


Yet to be Lived

by julesoftarth



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Road Trips, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2016-09-20
Packaged: 2018-02-20 17:03:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 30,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2436278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/julesoftarth/pseuds/julesoftarth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reckless and temperamental author, Jaime Lannister, is suffering from a crippling case of writer’s block. He decides to take a cross-country road trip in search of inspiration for his latest novel. Jaime’s agent, Catelyn Stark, sends her assistant, Brienne Tarth, to accompany Jaime on his travels and keep him out of trouble.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Arrangement

* * *

 

“Brienne, I have a favor to ask of you,” Catelyn said. “I’m afraid it’s a big one.”

“Is it your phone again?” Brienne asked. Catelyn’s iPhone seemed to have some sort of catastrophic meltdown on a monthly basis. Bringing the cursed thing back to the “Genius Bar” for the hundredth time didn’t exactly qualify as a big favor- it was part of Brienne’s job- but Catelyn always seemed to feel vaguely guilty about asking Brienne to do her job. Sometimes it seemed she might not realize Brienne was getting a paycheck every week for doing this sort of thing.

“It’s not the phone,” she said. “It’s Jaime Lannister.”

Brienne couldn’t control the scowl that crossed her face, hearing that name. She’d never met the man, but she’d heard Catelyn grumbling about him often enough to know that he was a ridiculous nuisance. She’d listened to her boss on the phone with Stannis Baratheon, more times than she could count, making demented excuses for Jaime Lannister.

Jaime Lannister has run into some trouble in Tijuana and his manuscript is going to be a few weeks late. Jaime Lannister has broken all of his limbs skydiving in Jamaica, please extend his deadline just a little bit more. Jaime Lannister has contracted malaria on an African safari, but he assures me his manuscript will be ready six weeks from now.  

Brienne wasn’t sure how much truth there was to any of the stories and she didn’t really know which was worse, if they were real or fabrications, but the fact remained, he never turned in his work on time. This might have been acceptable if he were churning out literary masterpieces, but Brienne knew his books were pulpy, grocery store trash. Mysteries and spy novels populated by heroes with names like Jack Manly and Max Power, and “sassy” blonde heroines with giant tits. Not that she’d ever read any of them, but in this case she thought it was probably acceptable to judge the books by their lurid, technicolor covers.

Perhaps most aggravating of all, these terrible books invariably crept their way into the top ten on the _New York Times_ Bestseller List. Every. Single. Time.

Brienne cleared her throat and tried to smile, tried to mask her distaste and maintain some degree of professionalism

“What about him?” she asked, in as neutral a tone as she could manage.

Catelyn sighed and folded her hands on top of her desk.

“He’s late on his manuscript,” she said. “Again.” Unlike Brienne, she made no effort to hide her annoyance. “He’s already missed two deadlines on this one. Stannis has given him another six week extension, but if it happens again, I believe he’s going to release Jaime from his contract.”

 _Good,_ Brienne thought, somewhat uncharitably. She didn’t often revel in the misfortunes of others, but if anyone deserved it…

Brienne would’ve done anything to be in Jaime Lannister’s position, to have an agent like Catelyn Stark and a contract with Baratheon Brothers Publishing, and the fool was pissing it all away. He clearly had no appreciation whatsoever for his good fortune, and certainly no sense of responsibility. He deserved to lose his contract.

“Jaime is a cash-cow for this agency,” Catelyn continued, reminding Brienne why she should care about any of this. “And for the Baratheons. But he’s stopped giving milk, and everyone is running out of patience.”

“Naturally,” Brienne said, wondering where she fit into the situation.

“He’s told me he’s planning on driving across the country a week from now,” Catelyn said. “He seems to believe it will provide the ‘boost of inspiration’ he needs to finish the novel.” She put air quotes around boost of inspiration, showing Brienne just how much stock she was putting into this plan.

“A trip,” Brienne nodded, and prepared to jot down the specifics on the notepad she’d brought into Catelyn’s office. "I should make travel arrangements, then?”

Her boss leaned forward with a serious, apologetic sort of expression and said, “I’d like for you to go with him.”

“With him? You mean… to pick up a rental car, or...?”

“On the trip,” Catelyn said.

“I don’t understand. What--”

“I know this is an unorthodox request,” Catelyn said quickly. “I know that it’s a lot to ask, and I want you to understand it’s not required of you. Of course if you accept, you will receive overtime pay for the duration of the trip, as well as a sizeable bonus if he manages to produce the bloody manuscript in time.”

Catelyn slid a piece of paper across the desk to Brienne with the payout details listed. Sizeable was an understatement. The bonus check alone would cover her rent for nearly six months.

“We need this novel written, Brienne,” she said. “Jaime has run into some… issues in the past, researching his novels, searching for inspiration. You remember the incident with the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s office? And the Finnish diplomat?”

Brienne winced. That story, at least, she knew for sure had been real.

“Of course,” she said.

“We can’t have anything like that happen on this trip,” Catelyn said.

“Of course,” Brienne said, again. “But why…” _Why me_ , she thought, miserably. _Why, God, why_??

“You’re one of the most responsible people I’ve ever known,” Catelyn told her. Brienne felt herself flushing from the unexpected praise. “I am certain if anyone can keep him on the right path, it’s you.”

“Has he agreed to this?” Brienne asked.

“I haven’t told him yet,” Catelyn said. “I’m going to frame it as a favor, loaning out my personal assistant. You’ll need to help him with practical matters on the trip, same as you would with me, but also…”

“Babysit?” Brienne offered.

“Keep him focussed on writing,” Catelyn told her.

“What about my job here?” Brienne asked. It was upsetting to think she might be so expendable. That she could be loaned out like a lawnmower.

“Don’t worry about that,” Catelyn said. “I’ll find a temp for the few weeks you’ll be gone.”

“ _Weeks?_ ” Brienne practically wailed.

“I know, I know,” Catelyn held up a hand. “It could be up to a month. I understand this is a lot to ask of you and it may be impossible. Of course you have a life of your own…”

The thing was, she really didn’t. She lived alone, no husband, no children, not even a pet to worry about. Her surviving family was all back in England, and her social life wasn’t exactly robust. Outside of this job, there was actually no reason at all she couldn’t pick up and leave the state for an indeterminate amount of time on a week’s notice. The thought was rather depressing.

She had no reason to refuse, other than her personal dislike for Jaime Lannister. The money would be hard to turn down, and she thought a trip might actually be sort of nice. She’d barely set foot off the island Manhattan in the past five years.

Most importantly, the thought of disappointing Catelyn Stark made her physically ill. She admired the woman more than almost anyone in the world, and Catelyn had taken a chance on Brienne when no one else would have. There’d been hundreds of applicants for this job with worlds more experience in the publishing industry. Brienne didn’t even have an English degree, but something had clicked between the two women during her interview. Catelyn just _liked_ her.

“No, no, I’ll do it,” Brienne said.

“Are you certain?” Catelyn asked. “Please, take a day or two to think it over if you need.”

“No, it’s… I’m sure it will be fine.”

Catelyn leaned back with a sigh, visibly relieved. “Thank you, Brienne. You are a godsend.”

Brienne smiled and silently vowed to herself that, for Catelyn Stark, she would get a book out of this fool if it was the last thing she ever did.

* * *

Later that night, Brienne did a Google search on Jaime Lannister, hoping to get a better idea of what she might be dealing with. The story about the Finnish diplomat was, irritatingly, still one of the top results, along with mixed reviews for his most recent offering, _The Castamere Conspiracy_. His book jacket photo, which she’d seen a few times already, showed him standing on a rooftop, looking back at the camera with what seemed to Brienne to be a deliberately inscrutable expression. He had a full beard and vaguely-unkempt looking hair. Brienne knew that a lot of people considered him to be devastatingly attractive, but frankly, she didn’t see it.

She found a blurb from _Forbes Magazine_ about his father, an oil magnate back in London who, according to Forbes, was one of the five hundred wealthiest people in the world. So Jaime was a spoiled little rich boy. Somehow, Brienne was not surprised. He was English, too, so at least they’d have something in common.

There was a post on a gossip blog, featuring a newspaper clipping from 2002, unearthed by someone who obviously had way too much time on their hands. The headline proclaimed: “Tywin Lannister’s eldest son earns dishonorable discharge from Royal Marine Corps.”

 _Figures,_ Brienne thought. There were no details about the reasons for the discharge, but she could only assume he’d done something idiotic.

The last thing Brienne looked at was a story from _The Daily Mirror_ about Jaime’s sister, Cersei Lannister, who had apparently died about a year ago in a plane crash over the French Riviera. Brienne had never heard of her, but it seemed she’d been a rather famous (or infamous) socialite in London. The plane was one of those tiny, private death traps that rich people seemed to enjoy flying about in, piloted by a man named Roose Bolton, who’d also died in the crash. Brienne didn’t recognize his name either, but he was the director of several gruesome-sounding horror films, and he’d been married to another woman at the time of the crash. The story was full of prurient speculation about the nature of his relationship with Cersei.

Brienne felt an unwelcome stab of sympathy for Jaime. She knew what it was like to lose a sibling. But the feeling quickly dissipated when, just as she was preparing to log off and go to bed, she received an email from the man himself.

 **To:** btarth@starkliterary.com

 **From:** JLannister@gmail.com

 **Subject:** The Arrangement

Dear Miss Tarf,

Catelyn Stark has apprised me of our “situation”, and I feel I should inform you that I have no need or desire for a personal assistant/nanny. However, as a creative individual, I am subject to the whims (and threats) of my business-minded patrons, and so it would seem we are stuck with one another.

As such, I would like you to do the following:

  1. Reserve a mid-sized luxury SUV (NOT a Range Rover) from a reputable rental agency for the entire month of August.
  2. Drive yourself to my home in said SUV on the morning of August the 1st.
  3. Arrive no later than 8 am.
  4. Bring a grande sized pumpkin spiced latte from Starbucks, and make sure it’s still HOT when you get here.
  5. Pack an appropriate amount of clothing and sundries, but limit yourself to no more than three (reasonably sized!) pieces of luggage.
  6. DO NOT wear any sort of perfumes or scented body lotions.
  7. If you wish to communicate with me further before our departure date, use email only. I will not answer if you attempt to call me on the telephone.
  8. Prepare for adventure.



Thank you in advance for abiding by these requests.

Sincerely,

Jaime Lannister

Brienne gaped at the screen in disbelief for a moment. Her fingers itched to type back a sarcastic, snide reply to each of his bullet-points, but, as always, she strived to keep things polite and professional.

 **To:** JLannister@gmail.com

 **From:** btarth@starkliterary.com

 **Subject** : Re: The Arrangement

Dear Mr. Lannister,

I will do my best to accommodate your requests.

For future reference, my name is Brienne Tarth, not Brienne Tarf.

I look forward to working with you.

Sincerely,

Brienne

She received an almost immediate reply:

 **To** : btarth@starkliterary.com

 **From:** JLannister@gmail.com

 **Subject** : Re: The Arrangement

Dear Nanny Tarth,

My deepest apologies for the typo. Enjoy your evening.

-Jaime

 "Oh my God,” Brienne moaned to her empty apartment. “What the hell have I gotten myself into?”

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I made [this photoset](http://julesoftarth.tumblr.com/post/99089729018/jb-appreciation-week-day-5-one-au-road-trip) for JB Week on tumblr, and then decided I really wanted to write the story to go along with it. There's also a photoset for the first chapter [here](http://julesoftarth.tumblr.com/post/99772834188/title-yet-to-be-lived-chapter-1-the). I'm hoping to make one for each chapter to show all of the places Jaime and Brienne visit on their journey. Thanks for reading my first attempt at Jaime x Brienne fic!


	2. Road to Nowhere

Unlike most of Catelyn’s clients, Jaime Lannister did not live in New York City. Jaime Lannister, it turned out, lived, inexplicably, in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. On a good day, this was an approximately two and a half hour drive from Brienne’s apartment. She couldn’t count on it being a good day. Calculating for traffic, the possibility of getting lost, and, of course, the Starbucks run, Brienne gave herself four hours and dragged her unscented body into a newly rented Cadillac Escalade at 4 o’clock in the morning on August the 1st.

It was just as well, really. She’d been plagued with insomnia for days. All week long, her dread had been mounting. The idea of spending weeks alone in a car with a complete stranger was enough to escalate her moderate social anxiety into a state of near panic, and the fact that her companion was apparently an insufferable prick certainly did nothing to ease her fears.

She arrived at the prick’s house at 7:30 am. It was a little red cottage in the woods, isolated and vaguely rundown. The foliage out front was slightly overgrown. Brienne thought it looked like a place where a shut-in might live, or someone’s vacation home fallen into disrepair.

She parked behind the obnoxious silver Porche in the driveway and took a deep breath.

It wasn’t too late to back out of this. She could turn around and drive home, call him and tell him she’d had some terrible family emergency. He’d probably be pleased.

_But Catelyn wouldn’t be pleased. Not at all._

She couldn’t break her promise. It was unthinkable.

_For Catelyn_ , she told herself, one final time, and headed for the door, which flew open before she had a chance to knock.

And there he was, Jaime Lannister. His hair was even longer and more unkempt than in his book jacket photo, and his beard was fuller. He had a scowl on his face and was wearing absolutely nothing but a pair of white boxer shorts festooned with hideous cartoon dinosaurs. He had, quite obviously and quite literally, just rolled out of bed.

“Is that my coffee?” he demanded, pointing at the thermos Brienne was clutching protectively to her chest.

“I- it’s- yes,” she stammered, and handed it to him.

“Why is it in a thermos?” he asked, looking at it skeptically. “Is this gas station coffee?”

“No! I wanted it to stay hot,” she told him. “You know the closest Starbucks is nearly twenty miles from here. It’s a good thing I--”

“You’re early,” he interrupted.

“You said before eight!”

“No, I said EIGHT!”  

“You said ‘no later’ than eight, which means before eight,” Brienne said. “And anyway, if I was expecting someone at eight, I’d be ready by seven-thirty.”

“Your life must be very dull,” Lannister said, then turned around and walked back into the house.

He left the door open, so Brienne assumed he meant for her to follow him inside.

It still wasn’t too late. She could run back to the car and drive far far away from here… but no. That was what he wanted, she realized. He was doing this on purpose. No one could be this unreasonable and rude by accident. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of scaring her away.

Her first thought upon entering the house was that he must’ve been robbed. The place looked utterly ransacked. There was clothing strewn all about the living room, along with open, partially packed suitcases. There was a laptop on the coffee table and next to it, bizarrely, was an Amazon delivery box that appeared to be filled with tubes of toothpaste. In the corner near the fireplace sat a disorderly pile of hair products and pre-packaged snacks. The sofa was covered with bed pillows and blankets, making her think he’d probably slept there. A few of the paintings on his walls were tilted askew, and one seemed to have fallen completely and was laying on the floor beside a stack of newspapers.

“You haven’t even finished packing?” she asked.

“You’re EARLY,” he insisted again.

“You couldn’t have expected to be done with this in thirty minutes,” she said. “And you really ought to finish packing the night before a--”

“AGHH!” Lannister cried out, suddenly. She looked at him in alarm, then realized he’d taken a sip directly out of the thermos. “This is too bloody hot!” he exclaimed, and slammed the thermos onto the bar separating his kitchen from the living area. “And it’s not a pumpkin spice latte!”

Brienne sighed. “It’s a regular latte with pumpkin syrup. The pumpkin spice latte is a seasonal beverage. The barista said it wouldn’t be available until the fall.”

“Well, that’s ridiculous!” he exclaimed.

“Tell it to Starbucks,” Brienne said with a shrug.

Lannister huffed his way to the living room and began tossing things into bags, haphazardly. Brienne lingered awkwardly in the entryway.

“Would you like some help?” she asked.  

“No!” he snapped. “Just stand there and wait!”

“Are any of these bags ready? I could bring some of this out to the car.”

“I don’t need you to carry my bags!”

She leaned against the wall, brushed her fingers through her hair, crossed and uncrossed her arms, watched him pack in a hurried, careless fashion.

His house really was little more than a shack, but it was a well-appointed (if messy) shack. She could see gleaming stainless steel appliances in the closet-sized kitchen, and all the furniture and fixtures looked expensive.

“I expected your place to be bigger…” she muttered absently.

“I expected you to be smaller,” he said with a smirk, and paused to look her up and down with exaggerated surprise.

Brienne rolled her eyes and turned away.  

She noticed an overturned photo frame on a shelf near the door, and lifted it up to set it right, just to have something to do. The photo showed a blonde woman in a black bikini, lounging in a beach chair on some tropical island or other. She was holding a drink in a coconut and sticking her tongue out at the camera. Her oversized sunglasses covered half of her face, so Brienne couldn’t be sure, but she thought it was the same woman from photo in the _Daily Mirror_ article. Lannister’s sister.

“What are you doing?!” he barked at her. “Put that down!”

She nearly dropped it, fumbling to put it back where she’d found it, face down.

“Sorry, I was just… straightening things,” she said. “You’ll be happier to return home to an orderly house, believe me.”

“Nobody asked you to be my housekeeper!” He yanked a ratty grey t-shirt over his head, then grabbed what looked like a road atlas from another random pile of crap and stomped over to her. He flipped open to a page with a map of the entire Northeast, from Maine to Virginia, and held it up in front of her face. “You want to help?” he asked. “Then close your eyes and point.”

“What?”

“Close your eyes and point,” he repeated. “It’s not that difficult. You’re going to pick our first destination.”

“Wait, you don’t know where we’re going? You haven’t got an itinerary?” Brienne was aghast. Who would plan a trip like this without an itinerary? What was _wrong_ with this man?

“No, I haven’t got an itinerary,” he said in a mocking, high-pitched voice that sounded nothing like her. “We’re going to find America! Now just point!”

Brienne sighed and did as he asked. When she opened her eyes again, he was shaking his head.

“ _Philadelphia_?” he asked, sounding disgusted. As though she’d chosen it on purpose.

“What’s wrong with Philadelphia? It’s in America.”

“It’s only two hours from here! I’ve been there _hundreds_ of times! And it’s horrible!”

“Well, perhaps your method of choosing destinations is flawed,” Brienne told him.

“No,” he said. “My method is perfect. You’re the flaw. Even your subconscious is dull!”

“Mister Lannister--”

“Call me Jaime, for God’s sake!”

“Fine! Jaime!” Brienne took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. She didn’t enjoy conflict, hated making a fuss, but this was beyond ridiculous. “Jaime, I understand you’re unhappy with this arrangement, but you did agree to it. If you’ve changed your mind, then please let me know, but I will not abide by this childish behavior!”

Jaime narrowed his eyes at her. The ghost of a smile crossed his lips.

“Fine,” he said. “Philadelphia it is, then.” He pulled an iPad out of a messenger bag that was laying on the floor near the coatrack, and handed it to her. “Here, Google Philadelphia. Find something interesting for us to do there.”

“I will not,” Brienne said. She didn’t need to have her choice of attractions dissected and mocked as well. “This is your wild goosechase.”

“And you are my assistant,” Jaime said. “That means you’re supposed to do as I ask.”

“What does this have to do with the book you’re writing?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet!”

“Oh my God… you haven’t started writing, have you?” The look on his face was answer enough to that question. “Do you even have an idea yet?”

“That is really none of your concern,” he said.

“You don’t! You haven’t even got an idea!”

“I did not agree to this so that you could harangue me like a fishwife across the entire country!” Jaime shouted.

He grabbed the iPad from her and shoved it back in the messenger bag, then shoved the messenger bag at Brienne.

“Here, just take this out to the car and wait for me,” he said.

“Is the charger in here?” she asked, and peeked into the bag. Other than the iPad, there was nothing inside but a roll of Mentos and three ball-point pens. Jaime had to be the worst packer she’d ever seen in her life.

“I don’t know where the bloody charger is! Just take it!”

“You should really have a centralized location for all of your chargers,” Brienne pointed out. “If you did, you wouldn’t have to worry about finding them in a situation like this.”

“Just get out!” Jaime hollered.

Brienne took the bag out to the SUV, tossed it in the back with enough force to (hopefully) break the iPad, and flopped into the driver’s seat. She started the engine, and, once again, considered driving away. She didn’t know how she was going to survive this. She was going to kill him. Or he was going to kill her. This road trip was going to end in bloodshed. There was no other possible outcome.

“What is WRONG with him?” she cried out, and banged her palms against the steering wheel several times.

He was a child, that was all there was to it. A middle-aged, hairy manchild. Brienne didn’t know very much about children, but she was pretty sure that if you didn’t react to their bad behavior, they’d eventually get bored and stop. She was letting herself get too riled up.

She closed her eyes and started doing some deep breathing exercises that she’d learned from her fencing coach, long ago. The exercises helped her to relax and get grounded before a match, and that’s really all this was. A fencing match, with words instead of sabres.

After a few moments, she felt the tension beginning to leave her body, and after a few more moments, she was sound asleep.

When she woke up, Jaime was tossing a suitcase into the back of the SUV. She looked out the window and saw he had at least five pieces of luggage on the ground, along with a laptop case, a paper grocery bag that appeared to be filled with electrical cords, and, troublingly, a tent and rolled up sleeping bag.

“Do you need help?” she called back to him.

“No!” he said. “I have a system. You’ll just mess it up.”

“Whatever…”

His “system” appeared to be throwing things in random directions and leaving them wherever they landed, but she was through arguing with him.

She rubbed her eyes and looked at the dashboard clock. It was already nine. She’d been asleep for over an hour.

After about ten minutes of grunting and banging, Jaime slammed the hatchback shut and came around to slide into the passenger seat. Thankfully, he’d put on a pair of pants.

“This isn’t really a ‘mid-sized’ SUV,” he pointed out. “It’s enormous. And it looks like a hearse.”

“Well it’s a good thing it's big, considering how much luggage you’ve got.”

“Are you in a better mood now that you’ve had your nap?” he asked.

“ME?” _Deep breaths_ , she reminded herself. _Do not engage_. She cleared her throat and said, “Yes, much better, thank you.”

“Good,” he said, and began programming the GPS.

“Have you found something to do in Philadelphia, then?” she asked.

“Yes, we’re going to the Mutter Museum,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“A collection of medical monstrosities.”

He looked at her with an smarmy little smirk, obviously waiting for a horrified reaction.

“How interesting,” she said. “Perhaps you’ll find all the inspiration you need there.”

“Oh, I doubt it,” he told her, cheerfully. “This is going to be a long trip, Nanny Tarth. I hope you packed a lot of underwear.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I owe much thanks to Laurel_Lilium for being my beta and sounding board on this. Photoset for this chapter is [here](http://julesoftarth.tumblr.com/post/100171970103/title-yet-to-be-lived-chapter-two-road-to).


	3. Brotherly Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaime and Brienne begin their adventure in The City of Brotherly Love. Jaime is not pleased.

* * *

 

Brienne was ignoring him. They’d only been on the road for an hour, and already he’d critiqued her driving (too slow), her luggage (she’d only brought two suitcases when he’d expressly told her to bring three, and he was NOT planning on making any pit stops for pantyhose or feminine hygiene products or whatever else she’d forgotten), her clothing (so much black- didn’t she know it was 100 degrees outside?), and her habit of tapping her fingers on the steering wheel as she drove (annoying!). All he’d gotten in return for his efforts was an “Mmhm” an “All right” and a few barely audible sighs. It was very disconcerting.

He knew she wasn’t a complete doormat. She’d proven that almost immediately when she stood up for herself back at the house. He was glad for it. If she was a spineless pushover, he’d never be able to get her to quit. He _needed_ her to quit.

Catelyn Stark had made it clear to him that his future with her agency was dependent, for some bizarre reason, on his agreement with this absurd arrangement. He had no idea how the woman expected him to write with this lumbering nag trailing him across the country, but he’d been left with no choice. He couldn’t lose Cat, so he couldn’t fire Brienne. His only hope of getting out of this with his career somewhat intact was to make the situation so unbearable for Brienne that she begged to be released from the assignment.

If the book had been even halfway complete- hell, if he had an idea for the blasted thing- he might have considered telling Cat to fuck off. There were plenty of other agents out there who’d be happy to have him, but not like this. Not when he hadn’t written a word in over a year. He couldn’t find another agent when he wasn’t writing, and without an agent to press him with deadlines he’d probably never write again. He was caught in a Catch-22, and the nanny had to go.

If relentless and unreasonable criticisms and demands weren’t enough to weaken her resolve, he was going to have to get a bit more personal.

“You haven’t got a boyfriend, I suppose,” he said as they passed the exit for Allentown.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Girlfriend? No, probably not that either.”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your concern,” she said. Her face was blank, but her hands were tightening on the wheel, knuckles turning white, and there was an angry red flush beginning to creep up her neck.

This was going to be a hit. Whichever gender she was interested in, he knew she couldn’t have suitors beating down her door. She was awkward, gangly and peculiar looking, with a severe, mannish haircut, and all the charisma of a table lamp. She’d tower over most men, and if that weren’t enough to put off their fragile egos, her schoolmarmish demeanor would surely send them running for the hills. She might have more luck with women, but probably not much more.

“I mean if you had anyone, anyone at all, surely you wouldn’t have agreed to this trip,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“You dropped everything in your life to drive across the country with a stranger on a moment’s notice. That tells me you haven’t got much going on in your life.”

She flinched a little, and he felt a tiny twinge of... something. Not quite guilt, but something.

“Besides,” he continued. “A man and a woman travelling alone together for all these weeks. If you had a boyfriend, surely he’d be unhappy about this.”

“It’s work,” she said. “That’s all.”

“Is that really all?” he asked. “Or did you agree to this for some other reason? Are you lonely, Nanny Tarth? Got an itch you need scratched? If you’re hoping for a touch and a feel in the back seat, I’d be willing to oblige.”

He was walking a dangerous line, almost certainly giving her grounds for a sexual harassment suit. Well, let her sue. He could afford better lawyers than her, and by the time it was all sorted, he’d have gotten her out of his car and finished his goddamn novel.

The flush was all over her face now, blotchy and fierce.

“You’re disgusting,” she spat, and turned on the radio.

For some ungodly reason, Brienne chose to put on the NPR satellite channel instead of listening to music like a normal person. A woman with a preternaturally calm voice was discussing the science behind wind and solar energy.

“Seriously?” Jaime asked. “We’re going to listen to this?”

“Yes.”

“You know, I have an mp3 player with a hundred thousand songs on it. I can get it out of my backpack.”

“I don’t want to listen to your music!” Brienne shouted. “And I don’t want to listen to you! I want to listen to this, and I’m the driver. The driver gets to choose, that’s the rule.”

Jaime sighed. That _was_ the rule. Everybody knew that.

“Fine,” he said. “But I’m probably going to slip into catatonia if you leave this on.”

“ _Good_ ,” Brienne said.

“You’ll miss me when I’m gone.”

“Stop talking!” Brienne barked. Jaime smiled to himself and leaned back in his seat. Mission accomplished, for the time being. He closed his eyes and let himself relax a bit. It was really rather exhausting, being so unceasingly irritating. And he was not a morning person. After a few moments of listening to the droning woman on the radio and the sound of his own breathing, he was asleep.

By the time he woke up, Brienne was pulling into a ridiculously over-priced parking garage where the odds of the SUV getting stolen seemed to Jaime to be about 50/50. He really did hate Philadelphia.

The Mutter Museum turned out to be a disappointing combination of dull and disgusting. It had a library-like atmosphere- nobody spoke above a whisper- and was filled with skeletons and deformed body parts in jars. The centerpiece was a giant colon which looked like some sort of antediluvian sea creature. Brienne seemed oddly fascinated with the place, which defeated his entire purpose in choosing it as a destination. She was a bigger freak than he’d anticipated. He left her staring, riveted, at a collection of bizarre objects people had swallowed and then had surgically removed from their bodies, and wandered amongst the display cases alone.

Eventually, he found himself in front of the remains of a set of conjoined twins, connected at the spine. According to the placard, they’d been five years old when one of the twins died of sepsis. The other one had lived for nearly 48 hours with the dead twin still attached to him, slowly poisoning him. He wanted to walk away, but found he couldn’t. He stood there for several minutes, transfixed by the grotesque thing.

 _This is my life now_ , he thought. _This is me_.

“Have you found something inspirational?” Brienne asked, and he jumped. He hadn’t even noticed her creeping up behind him.

“No,” he said.

“They’ve got a malignant growth from Grover Cleveland’s jaw!” she told him excitedly.

“Who the fuck is Grover Cleveland?” he asked.

“He was a president! Twice!” She was utterly scandalized by his ignorance, but he was too distracted to happy about it. “Don’t you know American history?”

“Not really,” he said. “Perhaps I should learn. Let’s go to the Liberty Bell.”

“But we just got here.”

“And I’m already bored. Let’s go.”

The Liberty Bell was about three miles away from the museum. Normally he would’ve taken a cab, but he figured walking might be a good opportunity to make Brienne suffer. When they got outside, he took off down the street, moving as quickly as he could without breaking into a jog. The sun was beating down on him, and he broke out in a sweat almost immediately. After a few blocks, he felt nearly ready to pass out.

He looked over at Brienne, who was keeping an even pace with his strides on her giant giraffe legs. She didn’t look even slightly winded, and somehow did not seem to have a drop of sweat on her body. The only sign of exertion came from her hair, which had partially escaped its gel casing and was hanging in frizzy tendrils around her face.

By the time they reached the Liberty Bell, he was completely drenched, panting and dehydrated. He bought a bottle of water from a street hot dog vendor, drank half of it and poured the rest over his head. Brienne just stood there watching him, nonplussed.

“Are you an alien?” he asked her. “Why aren’t you sweating?”

She shrugged. “It wasn’t that bad of a walk,” she said. “Though perhaps you ought to take it easy. It can’t be good for a gentleman of your age to be running about in the heat like that.”

“My _age_? How old do you think I am?” he demanded.

“Too old to be making an ass of yourself like this,” she said, and walked off to look at the bell. He took a moment to compose himself, catch his breath and wipe the water from his face, before joining her.

The Liberty Bell was inside a visitor’s center, which was full of boring historical documents and displays. Fortunately, it was air conditioned. The bell itself was behind a small metal enclosure. It was… a bell. A large bell, with a crack in it. He stood next to Brienne with his arms crossed over his chest and looked at it, waiting for it to do something interesting.

“Can we ring it, do you suppose?” he asked her.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to touch it,” Brienne said.

“Well, this is underwhelming,” he said.

“Perhaps it would be more meaningful if we were Americans,” she suggested.

“Shall I ask some of these Americans what it means to them?” he asked, gesturing around the room at the motley assortment of sweaty tourists.

“Please don’t,” she sighed. So he did.

He turned to the man standing nearest to them. “Excuse me, are you American?” he asked. The man was wearing a New York Yankees cap and was moderately obese, so Jaime figured the odds were in his favor.

“Oh, God,” Brienne groaned.

The guy looked vaguely offended. “Yeah,” he said. “Why?”

“Can you tell me what the Liberty Bell means to you?” Jaime asked.

“Are you a reporter or something?”

“Something like that,” Jaime said. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a lie. He was a reporter of life.

The guy scratched his head under his cap and pondered the question for a while.

“I guess… it means, uh, liberty?” he finally came out with. “And… freedom?”

Jaime nodded. “Interesting,” he said. He turned to smirk at Brienne, but she was no longer there. She’d moved far away from him, and was standing near the exit, pretending to look at her phone. He could see her blushing from all the way across the room.

She was, Jaime thought, rather inordinately embarrassed by the whole thing. He’d only meant to irritate her, not send her into an anxiety tailspin.

He turned back to his new friend and asked, “Can you tell me where to get a good cheesesteak around here?” At this, the guy lit up.

“Yeah, man, you gotta go to Campo’s Deli,” he said, and began cheerfully giving Jaime directions.

Thankfully, the place was only a couple of blocks away. He took the walk at a more leisurely pace, hoping to avoid giving himself heat stroke, but Brienne trailed behind him this time, looking morose.

The deli had outdoor seating, and when they arrived she planted herself at a table and told him to go and order whatever he wanted.

“You don’t want anything?” he asked.

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

For some reason, he found this pouty response more irritating than anything she’d said or done thus far, so he ignored it and made his order a double. Ordering a cheesesteak turned out to be something of a baffling ordeal (so many questions!), and the cashier wasn’t able to break his hundred dollar bill so he was forced to dig through his wallet for something smaller, almost dropping a giant wad of cash onto the ground. He felt as though everyone in line was staring at him impatiently as he struggled through the transaction and, once again, he cursed the entire wretched city of Philadelphia.

The food smelled good though, and he was starving. He brought it all back to the table and dumped Brienne’s sandwich in front of her, along with a bottle of water.

“I said I’m not hungry!” she told him.

“Well you should at least try it. It’s the local cuisine.”

She huffed at him and gingerly unwrapped her food.

“This looks vile,” she said, as he took an enormous bite out of his own sandwich. “Is that cheez whiz??”

“Mmm,” he nodded. It did look vile, a heaping pile of greasy meat, onions and artificial cheese on a soggy bun, but it tasted fantastic.

Brienne sighed and poked at her food, making faces.

“Come on,” he said. “You’ve had English food, surely you can stomach this.”

“I _like_ English food,” she insisted.

“That’s a lie. Nobody likes English food.”

She sighed yet again, and picked off a piece of the roll to eat.

“How did you wind up living in America, anyway?” he asked.

“My father moved to New York for business,” she said. “I wanted to be close to him.”

“Is he still there now?” Jaime asked. Brienne shook her head and looked, impossibly, even more unhappy.

“He retired and remarried and now he’s back in London,” she said.

“And yet, you stayed. To work for Catelyn Stark? Why?”

“What do you mean why?” she asked.

“I mean why, what for? Why did you want to work for her at all?”

“She’s the best,” Brienne said.

“So you wanted to be the secretary to the best?”

“I wanted to get into the industry,” she said.

“Why?” he asked again.

“What difference does it make?” she snapped. Apparently he’d touched another nerve, without even trying this time.

“Just making conversation. Good lord, what’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing! Nothing’s the matter with me, I’m just fine!” she exclaimed, rather passive-aggressively, in Jaime’s opinion. She took a bite of her cheesesteak, finally, and chewed with a wrinkly-nosed, disgusted expression.

They ate in silence for a bit, then she said, so quietly he barely heard it, “I have a book.”

“Hmm? You have a what?”

“A book! I have a book I’m trying to get published. Not that it’s any of your business.”

“Ah.” Of course she had a book. Every sullen, introverted freak in the city had a book. “Have you shown it to Cat?” he asked.

“Why do you need to know that?”

“Again, just making conversation…”

“It’s pretty personal,” she said. She was turning red again, just her ears this time, and staring down at her mess of a sandwich.

“She didn’t like it,” Jaime guessed.

Brienne’s eyes darted up and she met his gaze. It was the first time he’d really bothered to look at her eyes, and he was surprised to notice that they were actually quite beautiful.

“She… hasn’t said anything about it at all.”

Jaime felt an unpleasant stab of sympathy for the woman. There was nothing, absolutely nothing worse than getting no response whatsoever to your work. He’d take every scathing, hate-filled review he’d received in his life over silence, any day.

It was a perfect opening for more abuse, but Jaime found he didn’t have the heart for it, somehow.

“Perhaps she hasn’t read it yet,” he offered.

“Yes, perhaps,” Brienne said. Her expression hardened into a now-familiar scowl, and she crumpled up the paper surrounding the remains of her meal and tossed it into a nearby trashcan. “Are you finished?”

He was. Finished with his cheesesteak and finished with this horrid city.

As they trudged back to the car in a moderately uncomfortable silence, Jaime began to feel the creeping sensation that he was being watched, maybe even followed. It happened occasionally. People did recognize him from time to time. Once in a blue moon, someone on the street would ask him for an autograph, but typically they just stared, trying to figure out if he was really that guy who wrote that book and was related to _that girl_.

“Where are we heading next?” Brienne asked him. “I’m not doing the ‘close your eyes and point’ thing again…”

“No, you’re not,” Jaime agreed. He felt an almost suffocating need to escape the Northeast as quickly as possible. They could get on I95 and head south, drive as far as they could. He thought he could probably make it past D.C. before having to stop for sleep, if he booked it.

“Don’t worry about it, I’ll drive this stretch,” he told Brienne.

They’d almost reached the parking garage, and he ducked into an alley which, if he remembered correctly, was a short cut. Hopefully if someone actually were following him, they’d give up rather than chase him down a dark alleyway like a complete creep.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “I thought I was supposed to be the assistant.”

“I want to drive,” he said. “You can assist me by taking notes if I say something brilliant.”

“Oh good, it’ll be a nice long break then,” she said. He smiled, relieved to find she wasn’t entirely lacking in wit. “Why are we going this way?” she asked. “I don’t think this is the way to the--”

“Shh!” There were three shadows in the alley. Someone _was_ following them.

He turned quickly and saw there was a man about ten paces behind them. Jaime could barely make out a face. The sun was setting, so there was very little light coming down into the alley, and the man was wearing a hoodie pulled up over his head. His clothes were baggy and his build was slight. A teenager, Jaime realized.

Teenaged boys did not read Jaime’s books, and a hoodie in August did not seem to bode well for his intentions.

As soon as Jaime turned, the boy started moving very quickly towards them.

“Did you need something?” Jaime asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I need that stack of cash I know you got in your wallet.”

And that was when Jaime saw the gun.

* * *

 


	4. Local Cuisine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brienne tries to see the bright side of her situation. Jaime is full of surprises.

“I only have one hundred dollars,” Jaime said. He took out his wallet and held up a single bill, waved it in the air like a dog treat.

“That’s bullshit, I saw at least a thousand,” the mugger said.

“Well this is all you’re getting,” Jaime told him.

And that made it official- Jaime Lannister was a complete and utter fool. Flashing his money all over town, wandering down a dark, secluded alleyway for no apparent reason, and now he was attempting to bargain with an armed assailant.

Brienne certainly didn’t appreciate being referred to as “Nanny Tarth” but it appeared a nanny was exactly what this man required.

“Just give him the money,” she said with a sigh. The boy was young, maybe 15 or 16, with a slight build and skittish demeanor. His face was doughy with baby fat and damp with sweat, and his hand was trembling as he pointed the gun at Jaime. Brienne had at least six inches on him, maybe more. She thought she could probably disarm him fairly easily, but it didn’t seem worth the risk to try. The gun could go off accidentally if she startled him, and she wasn’t about to risk both their lives for a thousand dollars. Especially not when Lannisters apparently used one hundred dollar bills as toilet paper.  

“Yeah, listen to your wife,” the kid said.

“She is NOT my wife!” Jaime exclaimed.

“For God’s sake!” Brienne hissed at him.

“I don’t give a fuck who she is!” the kid shouted, charging closer to Jaime and waving the gun in a terrifyingly unfocused manner. “Just gimme the damn money!”

“All right, all right!” Jaime said. He yanked a comically thick wad of cash from his wallet and shoved it at the boy. “This is all of it, take it!”

The boy grabbed the money with his free hand and shoved it into the pocket of his sweatshirt. He was very close now, and Brienne mentally downgraded his age to 13 or 14. She wondered if he’d ever even fired that weapon before. His nerves and inexperience made him more dangerous, more unpredictable.  

“Phone too,” he said, gesturing with the gun towards the bulge in Jaime’s front pocket. Jaime’s eyes grew wide and his expression took on a panicked quality.

“Not the phone,” he said. “I need that.”

Brienne bit her tongue to keep from screaming. What was _wrong_ with this man?

The kid screwed up his face, looking as confused and frustrated as Brienne felt. Then he shoved Jaime against the brick wall behind them and pointed the barrel of the gun up against his temple.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” he asked. “Do you WANT to die?”

Brienne gave Jaime an imploring look over the kid’s shoulder. She begged him with her eyes. _Just give him the bloody phone. You can buy twelve more in the morning._

Jaime… was smiling. He was smiling.

He did want to die, she realized, with sudden, cold clarity. He wanted to die, or he didn’t care if he did, and that was fine with her, quite honestly. But it wasn’t going to happen on her watch. Dead men don’t write books.

She wished she had a sabre, or even a stick, but her arm was going to have to be enough.

“I’ve got a phone,” she said. “I’ve got it right here, you can have mine.”

The kid turned his body towards her and, before he could get the gun pointed at any part of her body, Brienne lifted her arm and knocked her fist into the underside of his elbow with as much force as she could manage. He let out a surprised yelp and the gun clattered to the ground without discharging. Thank God.

She grabbed the boy by the throat and punched hard him in the face. He clawed at her arms, trying to escape, while Jaime stood there gawping.

“Get the gun, you idiot!” she yelled at him. “And call the bloody police!”

So he did.

* * *

“What were you thinking?” she asked him later, when they were on the road again, after the police had come and gone and carted their pimply assailant off to the local holding facility for juvenile terrors.

“I was handing it,” Jaime insisted. She wondered if his pride had been wounded at all, being rescued by a woman. Not that she cared.

The policemen had been very impressed. One of them had even given Brienne his contact information, in case she ever wanted to join the force. They’d regarded Jaime with a sort of silent disdain.

“Handling it,” she scoffed. “You were about to get shot in the head for an iPhone!” 

“There are important things on that phone!” he said. “Irreplaceable things!”

“What things? Photographs of your genitalia?”

“I don’t need a bodyguard!” he snarled at her, and smacked at the radio for awhile, finally settling on an oldies station playing _Horse With No Name_.  

“Apparently that’s not true,” Brienne said.

“Nobody asked you to risk your life on my behalf,” he said.

“I’m risking my life right now, in this SUV” she pointed out. Jaime was, unsurprisingly, a terrible driver. He insisted on maintaining a speed at least 20 miles per hour above the posted limit at all times, and seemed to change lanes at random with no regard whatsoever for other motorists. “He could’ve shot me too,” she said. “All for a stupid phone!”

“It wasn’t the phone!” he barked at her. “There are texts and voicemail messages on there that I need to keep, all right?”

“From who?” she asked. “The bloody queen?”

“I don’t want to talk anymore,” Jaime said, and turned up the volume on the dismal music. She glanced over at him, tight-jawed and fuming, and suddenly remembered his dead sister.

She’d only been a little girl when her mother had died, but Brienne still remembered the way her father had held onto the last grocery list his wife had ever written. He’d carried that crumbling scrap of notebook paper in his wallet for years.

Brienne didn’t say anything else to Jaime for a long time.

He drove them out of Pennsylvania, past Wilmington and then Baltimore. Brienne was frequently homesick for London, but she had to admit there was some comfort in the familiarity of the US Interstate Highway system. Wherever you went, there were the same ugly green exit signs and you could always find a McDonald’s or a Best Western Motel somewhere in the vicinity.

They hit the Beltway at around eleven and she began to wonder if Jaime was ever going to stop at one of those Best Westerns, or if he was just going to keep driving all night long, listening to lite 70's rock music and sulking.

Eventually, she cleared her throat and said, “I have to use the loo.”

“Wait till we’re past D.C.,” he said. “And start looking for a hotel with a decent breakfast bar somewhere near Fredericksburg.”

She dug out her tablet, gladdened by the prospect of climbing into a bed sometime soon. In her own, private room. Far away from Jaime Lannister.

“Where did you learn to fight like that, anyway?” he asked, as she was flipping through the hotel listings on Travelocity.

“I’ve been fencing since I was a little girl,” she told him. “And I’ve taken classes in boxing, karate, tae kwon do…”

“I could’ve disarmed him,” Jaime interjected. “I was in the military, you know.”

She did know, thanks to her Google-snooping, but she wasn’t about to mention that. Or the dishonorable discharge, though she was beginning to grow curious about precisely what sort of insanity had led to it.

Instead, she asked, “Why didn’t you?”

She prepared herself for some nasty, defensive retort, but Jaime just sighed and quietly admitted, “I don’t know.”

* * *

 They stopped around midnight, at a Comfort Inn which, according to reviews, housed the finest breakfast bar in the state of Virginia. Brienne didn’t particularly care about breakfast bars, but she was relieved to find that the room was clean and the pillows weren’t too squishy. Shutting the door and finding herself alone for the first time all day was an even greater relief. Jaime’s room was all the way down the hall, six doors away, and that was the greatest relief of them all.

She opened her laptop before bed, and found three emails from Catelyn Stark. The first two were “just checking in” and “how’s the first day of your journey?” The third had a slightly concerned tone, and included a request for Brienne to respond “ASAP, so I know you’re all right.”

Brienne typed a quick response:

_Dear Ms. Stark,_

_The trip is not going very well. Jaime Lannister is an extremely unpleasant person. I sincerely doubt he will complete his manuscript during our travels. In fact, I sincerely doubt he will complete his manuscript at all. He’s all but admitted he hasn’t even begun, and does not seem remotely concerned. I am truly sorry, but I do not believe I can help him. With your permission, I would like to return home as soon as possible._

She stared at it for a moment, and then deleted the words. Tried again.

_Dear Ms. Stark,_

_The trip has been interesting so far. Jaime is a very unusual man. We were in Philadelphia this afternoon, and I think he may have gained some inspiration from one of the museums we visited. We are staying in Virginia tonight. I will phone you in a day or so to let you know how things are going._

_Also, unfortunately, we were mugged this evening. We’re both fine, but the police may be in touch with you at some point about that._

_Take care,_

_Brienne_

She hit send before she could change it back to the version of miserable defeat.

She checked her phone one last time, and found a text from her neighbor, Margaery. Marg had moved into the apartment next door to Brienne’s about a year ago, and, much to Brienne’s surprise, had decided that Brienne was “cool” and that they should hang out. She’d invited Brienne over for wine and a _Vampire Diaries_ marathon one rainy Sunday, and Brienne had accepted in spite of her dislike for _Vampire Diaries_ and her discomfort with petite, beautiful women. They bonded over gossip about the peculiar people who lived in their apartment building as well as their mutually non-existent love lives, and became… not quite friends, but something close to it.

Brienne had asked Marg to keep an eye on her apartment and take in her mail while she was away. She’d told her a bit about the trip, but Marg wasn’t much of a reader and had never heard of Jaime Lannister.

Apparently she’d been doing some research since then, because the text read: _Googled your travelmate. Is he as hot in person as he looks in pictures??_

Brienne rolled her eyes and wrote back: _He is not hot. He’s rude, arrogant, juvenile, foul tempered, and possibly deranged. He looks like a wookie and I hate him already._

Marg responded immediately: _Ok well can u introduce me to him when u get back??_ And then: _What’s a wookie?_

 Brienne turned off her phone and crawled into bed with a sigh. She hoped that she would be able to sleep, and that she wouldn’t dream of Jaime Lannister.

* * *

In the morning, Brienne woke naturally at about 6 am, as she did most every day, but she allowed herself to rest in the peace and quiet of her empty room until 8:30, when Jaime had requested his “wake-up knock”.  

She steeled herself as she approached his door. She’d gotten a good night’s sleep, with no dreams that she could remember, and felt far more prepared than she’d been yesterday for whatever lunacy the day might hold. She’d had no idea what to expect on her way to meet Jaime for the first time. Now she knew, and even though the situation was far worse than she’d originally feared, she found she was no longer nervous about having to face him. Merely irritated.

She tapped lightly on the door, and, when there was no response, knocked harder.

She heard a muffled groaning coming from inside the room, and then Jaime shouted, “Go away!”

“You asked me to wake you at 8:30,” she called, and knocked again.

“Go away!” Louder this time.

“Don’t you want to go to the breakfast bar?”

Another groan. Well, fine then. Brienne didn’t want to have breakfast with him anyway. She’d noticed the tank on the SUV was nearing empty last night. She’d take it to the gas station and find something better to eat while he slept the day away.

She pulled a pad of Post-Its from her bag, not wishing to converse through the door with a barely conscious Jaime any further, and jotted down a note to let him know where she’d be, on the off chance he decided to get out of bed on his own and try to find her. She slipped the note under his door and left to explore by herself.

The town was a typical off-ramp glut of fast food chains and convenience stores, but Brienne also found a quaint little farmer’s market a few miles off the main drag and decided to wander the stands for awhile.

It was a beautiful day, sunny and cooler than it had been for the past few weeks. The air was cleaner, crisper than what she was used to breathing in the city. It was nice to be someplace new, she realized, in spite of everything. Freeing somehow. She felt strangely, and somewhat pleasantly, untethered to her life and was able, for once, to enjoy a moment for what it was.

Marg was always telling her to “live in the now” and stop worrying so much. It seemed everyone she’d ever known her entire life had told her that at one point or another. Perhaps this trip was an opportunity to practice that skill. She didn’t foresee many enjoyable moments with Jaime Lannister, but maybe she could grab a few on her own.

She picked up some snacks for the road, nuts and fruit and juice boxes, and, on a whim, grabbed a package of apple cider donuts for breakfast. She’d never had one before, but they looked delicious.

When she got back to the hotel, she was surprised to see Jaime in the parking lot, pacing and gesticulating madly. He looked like he was on his precious iPhone phone, shouting at someone.

_Oh joy._

When he saw her pulling in, he threw his arms up in a frustrated gesture.

“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded, when she got out of the SUV. “I’ve been calling you for an hour!”

“I went to get gas and supplies,” she said. “My phone must be off. I left you a note.”

“You did NOT leave a note!” he insisted. “I thought you’d run off or something!”

She wondered why that would be cause for anger and not celebration. Pushing her to abandon this journey seemed to have been his raison d’etre yesterday.

As she got closer, she noticed a slip of yellow paper sticking out from under his foot.

“It’s there,” she said, pointing. “Stuck to the bottom of your shoe.”

He lifted his foot, as if he were checking for dog poop, and peeled the Post-It from the sole of his shoe. He stared at the note accusingly, wrinkling his nose in distaste.

“This is a very small note!”

“Perhaps you need glasses,” she suggested with a smirk. She found herself more amused than dismayed at his belligerence this morning, possibly due to her own improved spirits.

“I do not need glasses! You need to--”

“I got donuts,” she said, cutting him off.

She held up the bag and he regarded it with narrow-eyed suspicion. His mouth was still hanging open from yelling at her.

“Local cuisine,” she added, and at this he broke into a grin. A full, genuine grin, with teeth. Nothing like the sneers and smirks he’d shown her previously.

“I’m glad to see you’re getting into the spirit of this trip,” he said. His eyes were sparkling, and she felt an absurd flush of pleasure from having apparently pleased him. She saw, for the first time, why people might find Jaime Lannister remotely attractive.

Not that _she_ did. Obviously.

They sat together in the SUV for awhile, eating their breakfast in a semi-companionable silence. After she’d finished her first donut, and he’d finished his fourth, she asked, “Where are we heading today?”

“The mountains,” he said. “I want to drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway.”

“All right.”

She thought of the tent he’d brought, and wondered if he was planning on camping in those mountains tonight. She was almost afraid to ask.

“Brienne,” he said, then paused.

“Hm?” she looked at him curiously. He was staring straight ahead and fidgeting with his napkin. He seemed to be struggling with whatever it was he wanted to say. She noticed a donut crumb in his beard, just as he reached up to wipe it off.

“Thank you,” he finally said, so quietly she might have missed it. “For yesterday. You probably saved my life.”

She had to hand it to him; Jaime was full of surprises. Most of the surprises were terrible, but apparently there were some good ones in there as well.

“Oh,” she said, then cleared her throat. “Yes. I mean, of course. You’re welcome.”

He nodded once, then began programming the GPS. Conversation over.

“Off we go then,” he said. “Into the wild blue yonder.”

She pulled out of the parking lot and back onto the highway, heading south.

 _I have no idea what will happen today_ , she realized. It was an unusual feeling for her, but not entirely unwelcome. Whatever lay ahead, she figured it couldn’t be any worse than yesterday, and for now that was enough.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry this update took such a long time! I will try to do better with the next one. Thanks for sticking with me.


	5. Blue Ridge

* * *

 

“Jaime, it’s me. Again. One of these days you’re going to have to answer the telephone. Listen, are you still in touch with that executive at Warner Brothers? Phil? That was his name, wasn’t it? You’re still on good terms, yes? Roose and I were hoping you could arrange a meeting. Roose has a brilliant new script he’s trying to shop around… I’ll tell you all about it when you call me back. Do call me back, would you? This is getting rather tiresome. Anyway, we’re about to take off- Roose finally got his pilot’s license… it’s all very exciting. I’ll try you again later if I don’t hear from you. Let me know about Phil, hm? Or was it Paul…? I’m sure you know who I mean. Goodbye, Jaime.”

The first time Jaime heard that message, he was at his vacation house in the Poconos. Or, as Tyrion liked to call it, his “hermit hidey-hole”. The house was where he liked to write, where he tended to get the most accomplished, if only because the place was so deathly boring there was literally nothing to do BUT write. He’d been enjoying a particularly productive afternoon when the phone rang, and he’d ignored it, not wanting to break his momentum. He hadn’t listened until later that night, as he was grilling a steak in the backyard.

_I wish Roose was dead._

That’s what Jaime thought, when he listened to the message, and the next day his father called to let him know his wish had come true. As was often the case with granted wishes, there had been unintended consequences.

How many times had he listened to the message since that day? Dozens? Hundreds? He wasn’t entirely sure, but he had the whole bloody thing memorized. Every word. Every sigh (there were a lot of sighs).

He listened to it three times in a hotel room in Virginia, the night he’d almost lost his life to hold onto it. And he listened to it again the next morning, after taking a piss at a scenic overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

As Jaime looked out across the picture-perfect vista, he found himself wondering how something so beautiful could still exist. Why were these mountains still here, when the worst thing in the world had happened?

He hadn’t left his hermit hidey-hole very much since the crash. Just the brief, excruciating visit to London for the funeral and one misbegotten journey to Scranton, where, at Tyrion’s urging, he’d attended a terrifying meeting of an aimless, disconsolate group of people calling themselves the Twinless Twins Support Network. He couldn’t bear to return to his apartment in New York, where Cersei had been so many times, so he’d asked his realtor to sell it, furniture and all, and have his personal effects shipped to him in the Poconos.

He supposed he’d been hibernating, more or less, for the better part of the year, and everything he’d seen so far on this road trip had been startling in much the same way. How could the Liberty Bell still exist? How could people still shop and eat cheesesteaks and drive on the highway and stay at hotels? How could everything remain so unchanged?

_And why am I still here to see it?_

“Ready?” Brienne asked, appearing, seemingly, from the ether, and jolting him out of his thoughts. He wondered how long she’d been lurking about, watching him.

“Yes, I suppose,” he said.

“I haven’t interrupted an inspirational moment, have I?”

Inspirational moment. Now that was a laugh. He hadn’t had one of those since that night last year, grilling steak in his backyard and imagining all the gruesome ways a man might die. It had led to his finally settling on a motivation for his villain, and the words had poured out of him for hours. Until dawn. Until his father’s call.

He still wasn’t sure how he’d managed to write all night long without realizing something was amiss. Why hadn’t he known right away? Why hadn’t he _felt_ it?

“No, you haven’t interrupted anything,” he told her. “Let’s go.”

They got into the SUV and Brienne pulled back onto the parkway. There was a low mist hanging over the mountains and storm clouds gathering in the sky. The road was full of sharp turns, steep inclines, and jagged overhangs. There were moments when no blacktop was visible, and it seemed they might be simply floating in the mist, about to plunge to their deaths in the valley below. Today, Jaime was grateful for Brienne’s overly cautious driving habits.

“It’s sort of spooky, isn’t it?” Brienne asked, after clearing a particularly treacherous looking curve. “Feels a bit haunted out here.”

“Haunted? You believe in ghosts, Nanny Tarth?”

She shrugged.

“Maybe. Sometimes.”

“I didn’t take you for the type,” he said.

“What type is that?”

“Superstitious,” he said. “Irrational.”

“I’m not either of those things,” she insisted. “It just makes sense. I thought _you_ would be imaginative enough to believe in some things you can’t necessarily see.”

Sometimes Jaime regretted becoming a novelist. Everyone expected him to be “imaginative”, for his mind to be a wellspring of neverending creativity, but in truth he was more lucky than he was creative. He didn’t spend a lot of time daydreaming, or contemplating those “what-if” questions that writers were supposed to obsess over. Stories tended to come to him, fully formed, and he spat them out when the mood hit without giving it very much thought. At least, that’s how it used to be. Maybe his luck had finally run out.

He sighed and took a donut from the bag that was resting between their seats.

“It’s bollocks,” he said, around a bite. “Fantasy.”

“But how can you know that for sure?” she asked.

_If ghosts were real, she would’ve come to me by now._

“Because I am a rational human being,” Jaime said. Brienne scoffed at that, which he supposed was fair, all things considered.

“So what do you think happens when we die then, Mister Rational?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing happens. Just… poof.” He snapped his fingers, then popped the rest of the donut into his mouth.

“But where does it _go_?” she asked. “One moment we’re here, living, breathing, thinking… loving. And then, does the battery just wear out or…?

“It’s just gone,” Jaime said with a sigh. He wasn’t sure how they’d gotten onto this topic, but it was starting to remind him, rather unpleasantly, of the ponderous, drug-induced conversations he’d been subjected to constantly at university. Christ, how he’d hated it there. Pretentious fuckwits around every corner. He’d dropped out after just one year and joined the military instead. A decision he never allowed himself to regret, in spite of everything that had gone wrong since then.

“That doesn’t make sense to me,” she said. “There’s too much--”

“It’s nothing,” he said.

“But that would mean we’re nothing, right now.”

“We ARE nothing,” he told her. “We’re bugs, splattering on windshields.”

Jaime thought of the gun pointed at his head last night. It wouldn’t have been bravado to say he’d felt no fear in that moment. It wasn’t the first time he’d found himself on the wrong end of a gun- he’d been shot at by deadly snipers on the streets of Sarajevo, Taliban insurgents in the mountains of Afghanistan, and, once, by a crazed Scottsman outside a pub in Manchester- and he’d never been ashamed to admit that these events had been profoundly frightening. Exhilarating too, in their way. He’d always thrived a bit on danger and risk-taking. But he had been afraid.

Last night he’d felt… relief. _Finally_ is what he’d thought, and he hadn’t been imagining an afterlife. An absence of life, an ending, emptiness, that’s what he’d imagined. Total obliteration. All of his thoughts and memories and, yes, his love, flying out the back of his head with bullet and brain matter, leaving… nothing.

Nothing sounded just fine to him.

“We are more than bugs!” she insisted.

“We’re not,” he said. “This whole idea of a soul, an afterlife, it’s a story we tell ourselves to feel better about death. That’s all.”

Brienne sighed. “How did you get so cynical?” she asked.

“Years of practice,” he said.

She scowled disapprovingly, an expression he was growing all too accustomed to seeing on her face.

“Well, what do _you_ think happens?” he asked. “Ghosts and angels? A heavenly choir and St. Peter waiting for you at the Pearly Gates?”

“I don’t know, but it isn’t nothing. It can’t be.”

“Are you hoping it’s something better than this?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said.

“Well, I can’t think that way.”

Nothingness was an appealing notion, to be sure, but not half as appealing as some of the other possibilities. Possibilities he’d thought about, obsessed over, in the months after the crash. It was dangerous to let himself think that way.

She gave him a curious glance, then quietly asked, “Isn’t there someone you hope to meet again? Someone you’ve lost?”

Was she baiting him on purpose? Trying to get him to “open up” about his problems? Or was she really this stupid? Was it possible she didn’t even know?

“Yes!” he spat. “That’s exactly why I can’t-- I _won’t_ let myself believe this nonsense.”

“Well they must be out there somewhere,” she said. His chest went tight and clampy and he felt a deranged urge to strike her.

“They’re not!” he shouted. “It’s over! For God’s sake, won’t you shut up about it?!”

Brienne flinched in surprise and made a startled jerk on the steering wheel. Jaime looked at her face- lips pulled inwards, quivering chin- and thought she might actually start to cry, which he found incredibly frustrating. She’d sucked it up through all of his abuse yesterday, and now suddenly she was going to fall to pieces over a little barking? What right did _she_ have to start crying about this and making _him_ feel guilty?

He took a deep breath and ran his hand over his face.

“I’m sorry,” she practically whispered, with a warbly, tear-choked voice.

“No, it… it’s me,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

She nodded her head and wiped at her cheek with the back of her hand. It occurred to him, too late, that she’d probably lost someone as well. Hadn’t everyone, at some point or another? Someone she was thinking of and wishing to see again. He hoped, selfishly, that it was the thought of that person making her cry. He hoped it wasn’t just because of him.

“S’all right,” she said.

But it wasn’t. Fuck, he was a wreck. What had he been thinking, agreeing to this? He wasn’t fit to be around another person.

He took a deep breath. Tried to explain.

“I don’t know what happens,” he said. “But if I let myself believe she’s out there somewhere, I’m likely to go looking.”

Brienne darted her eyes in his direction, rather nervously in Jaime’s estimation, but thankfully she didn’t say another word about it. She didn’t say another word to him at all, for quite some time.


	6. The Cabin in the Woods

* * *

 

The Blue Ridge Parkway seemed to go on forever. It took three days to wind down the length of it, and Brienne had to admit the journey was not entirely unpleasant. The scenery was beautiful, and the attractions were plentiful. They took turns driving and made frequent stops to hike, visit museums, and eat picnic lunches. At one scenic overlook, they walked across the highest suspension footbridge in America, which led to one of the most breathtaking views Brienne had ever seen.

They behaved like proper tourists, even pausing to take silly photos of each other in front of various landmarks, and through it all, Jaime was… different. Polite. Distant. He said please and thank you and let her choose the music whether she was driving or not. He made forced, awkward small talk about safe topics of conversation such as how many U.S. states they’d each visited before this trip (twenty for him, six for her) and favorite movies and television programs.

Her fears about sleeping in Jaime's tent turned out to be unfounded. They left the parkway every evening and found lodging in nearby towns. The first night they stopped at a seedy, off-ramp dive where Brienne found an empty bottle of Jack Daniels at the bottom of the closet and a live raccoon in the bathtub. She’d been too exhausted and grateful for a bed to bother complaining to the staff, and had simply herded the thing out the door with the toilet plunger. When she told Jaime about it in the morning, he laughed and said something about “local flavor”, but the next night he found them a clean, comfortable Marriott in Asheville.

He was trying. Making an effort to get along with her. Tiptoeing around her, a little bit, and she was doing the same with him. Their conversation about death and his subsequent outburst had changed things between them. Turned them back into near strangers, somehow. It was more of what she’d expected this trip to be in the first place, before she ever met Jaime. More what she’d wanted. Now, she wasn’t sure how to feel about it.

She did some more research about Jaime, about his situation. Google-snooping, which felt odd now that she actually knew him. It seemed like a violation even though the information was all out there, readily available to anyone with an internet connection. It seemed wrong somehow, to find it online when she could’ve just asked him. She was afraid to ask him about his sister, though. Afraid of another blow up, or something worse.

They were twins, it turned out. Jaime and Cersei. Cersei and Jaime. There were hundreds of pictures of them together online. At restaurants and movie premieres, bars and cafes, all over the world. Looking at the photos, Brienne could see why they were the subject of such intense interest. They were absurdly wealthy, of course, and certainly photogenic, but that wasn’t all. They projected something when they were together- an intangible, magnetic quality that bled through even in still photographs. She found a particularly memorable shot posted on some random person's twitter feed. They were exiting the Royal National Theatre together, Jaime in a tuxedo and Cersei in an evening gown. His arm was draped casually around her shoulders and he was whispering in her ear. The hashtags posted along with the photo (# _so hot, #totally doing it, #twincest_ ) caused Brienne to finally slam her laptop shut in disgust. What was wrong with people?

Jaime was clean-shaven in most of the photos with his sister, and Brienne was forced to finally admit that he was almost absurdly good looking. Once she saw the beauty of his facial structure, she couldn’t unsee it. It was there, buried under unkempt piles of hair and whiskers, and it was impossible to ignore.

Brienne also read an article on bereaved twins and found some unsettling information. Apparently when one twin died, the other tended to follow shortly after, either by suicide, illness, or accident. Fifty percent of the time, this happened within two years. Fifty percent. It was a staggering statistic, and highly worrisome when combined with some of the things Jaime had said to her.

She began to wonder how much Catelyn Stark knew about Jaime’s current mental state, and if he could truly be expected to write a book under these circumstances. She also couldn’t help but wonder if her presence was helping him at all, or only making things worse.

At the end of the parkway, they reached the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Brienne assumed Jaime would be tired of mountains by then, but he surprised her by bringing her to a “rustic” cabin at a place called Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park Resort and Campground, also known as "Yogi in the Smokies". She supposed she ought to be grateful that he’d forgone the idea of sleeping in a tent again, but when she saw the inside of the cabin she became truly alarmed.

There were beds- two of them, thank God- but there were no walls separating them. The cabin was basically one large room containing a queen-sized bed, decrepit looking sofa and dining table, and a kitchenette off to the side. Above the room was a small loft space where the other bed sat, overlooking the living area. There was one bathroom, with a tiny camp shower and a wooden screen instead of a door. The whole place was decorated in tacky prints and Yogi Bear portraits.

“Well,” Jaime said, once they’d had a look around. “This is quaint.”

“Where’s the rest of it?” Brienne asked.

“It’s cozy,” he said.

“Perhaps I should get my own cabin,” she offered, hopefully.

“There aren’t any others available,” he told her. “I made the reservation a month ago, when I thought I’d be alone…”

“You made reservations?” So this trip wasn’t as haphazardly planned as he’d led her to believe, then.

“I thought I’d be like Henry David Thoreau or something.”

“I don’t think Henry David Thoreau slept on a Yogi Bear comforter.”

Jaime shrugged and turned on a rattling window A/C unit. “It’ll be fun,” he told her.

“I suppose it’s only for one night…” she said. She looked up at the loft bed, then back down at the living area. If she took the bed on the lower level, with Jaime in the loft, he’d be able to watch her from above, all night long if he felt like it. The loft would give her a tiny bit more privacy, but she’d have to go down a little wooden ladder and walk past Jaime every time she needed to use the loo.

“Three nights, actually,” Jaime said.

She turned to him, aghast. “ _Three?_ ”

He shrugged again and gave her a vaguely apologetic looking smile.

“I’m going to have a walk around the grounds,” he told her. He waved his hand in the direction of the beds and said, “Sort this out however you like.”

Brienne sighed. He was, at least, attempting to be something of a gentleman by leaving the sleeping arrangements to her, but there was really no way to sort it. The only satisfactory solution would be to move one of the mattresses into another room, but _there was no other room_.

She pondered the dilemma for a few moments, then finally settled on rotating the bed on the lower level so that it was parallel to the loft overhang. Fortunately it wasn’t bolted to the ground, and the bed frame was a flimsy metal contraption that wasn’t particularly heavy. She dragged and shoved the thing into position without much difficulty, then hung the Yogi Bear comforter from the overhang to make a sort of primitive privacy curtain. She crawled inside the lower bunk, and found it was pleasantly dark and cool. A little cocoon where she could at least pretend to be alone. And if Jaime decided to climb down from the loft and run off in the middle of the night to fling himself from a mountaintop, he'd have to get past her first.

With that decided, she took the opportunity of his absence to have a quick shower and change into some more comfortable clothes. Then she poked around the cabin a bit, wondering what they’d do there for three days and nights. There was no television, no wifi. Her cell phone wasn’t even getting a very strong signal. She found a stack of battered looking board games in a cupboard. Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit, Risk and Boggle. She tried to imagine playing them with Jaime, but found it nearly impossible.

It would’ve been a good place to write, she figured, for someone traveling alone. It was secluded and quiet, scenic but with few distractions. She could see why he’d chosen it. But if Jaime’s writing habits were anything like her own, he probably wouldn’t be able to get very much work done at all with the two of them living practically on top of each other.

Once again, she found herself wondering if she was more of a hindrance than a help.

Jaime was gone almost two hours, just enough time for her to start worrying. By the time he came back, the sun was setting and Brienne was sitting in the rocking chair on the cabin’s porch with a book on her lap. She saw him shuffling up the path, looking sweaty and disheveled, carrying several heavily leaden plastic bags.

“What is all that?” she asked. “Do you need help?”

“I found the camp store,” he said. “Provisions.”

“Let me take some of those,” she offered again, but he pushed past her without handing her anything.

She followed him inside, to the kitchenette where she tried to help him unpack some of the groceries he’d bought. There was barely room for the two of them to stand between the cabinets and the small serving island. She bumped against him five or six time, spilled a paper bag full of apples onto the floor, knocked the toaster into the sink. Finally he shooed her away.

“I’m not an invalid,” he said with a scowl. “I can put away my own groceries.”  

“I’m supposed to be your assistant,” she reminded him.

“Well, you’re not assisting me,” he told her.

She sat at the dining table with a sigh. An apple rolled by her foot. She felt useless and cumbersome; in the way.

After he’d unloaded the last bag, he turned to her and asked “Can you cook?”

“Yes! I can definitely cook,” she said, relieved to have a purpose.

Predictably enough, Jaime had done a terrible job of shopping. He’d selected a seemingly random assortment of items, no combination of which would amount to the contents of a proper meal. There was spaghetti, but no sauce. Sliced bread, but no lunch meat. A bag of pork rinds, a carton of blueberries, and three Milky Way chocolate bars. A package of American Cheese, a bag of sliced pepperoni, an avocado. A large bottle of red wine. A carton of eggs, which she supposed was at least moderately useful.

She set about making omelettes with the cheese and avocado while Jaime took a shower. She could hear everything he did in the bathroom - peeing, flushing, turning on the shower and groaning when he stepped under the hot water. She turned the A/C to high so the fan would kick back on and drown out the sounds.

As she was laying their meal out on the dining table, Jaime strode back into the living area wearing nothing but a towel. Brienne quickly averted her eyes.

She heard him shuffling through his suitcase, and then the unmistakable thwap of a wet towel hitting the floor. She stared pointedly at her omelette.

“What are you _doing?_ ” she hissed at him.

“Getting dressed,” he said. “Turn around if you don’t want to see.”

She continued to look at the pile of eggs and avocado on her plate. She felt a hot flush beginning to creep up her neck and face. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of turning around like some prudish maiden, but she didn’t want him to see her skin turning tomato-colored at the presence of a naked man either. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, willing her body to stop reacting.  

After several moments which felt like several hours, Jaime finally came to sit at the table wearing a t-shirt, flannel pajama pants, and an insufferable smirk.

“Well, this looks edible,” he said. “Breakfast for supper, I like it.”

“You didn’t leave me with many options,” she pointed out.

He poured some wine into the plastic, Yogi Bear emblazoned cups she’d found in the cabinet, and they ate in a fairly uncomfortable silence for a bit. Her cheeks still felt hot, and she found herself unable to look Jaime in the eye. She hadn’t seen much of his naked body, but it had been enough to make her irritatingly embarrassed.

“I like what you’ve done with the place,” he told her eventually, gesturing towards her makeshift bunkbeds with his fork. The beds suddenly seemed even closer to each other than they had before.   

_What if he sleeps naked?_

“Um, yes. I thought that would be… agreeable,” she muttered. She took a sip of the wine. It was cheap and pungent, and red wine and eggs were a disgusting combination. Still, it was better than nothing.

“I promise I don’t snore,” Jaime said. She glanced up at him and he winked at her. She took another sip of wine. Cleared her throat.

“Do you think you’ll be able to write here?” she asked.

“Maybe,” Jaime said. “I suppose anything’s possible.”

“Have you got any ideas?”

He shrugged, seemingly unconcerned. “I’m sure they’ll come. They always do.”

That didn’t sound particularly promising.

“What’s your book about?” he asked.

Brienne was startled by the question, and felt herself beginning to flush all over again. She’d almost forgotten she’d ever told him about the damned book.

“Um, I don’t think you’d be all that interested,” she said.

“Well, that’s a terrible answer,” he said. “Are you trying to shop this thing or not?”

Was she? Brienne wasn’t entirely sure. When she’d first gotten the job at the Stark Agency, she’d been operating under the naive hope that Catelyn would read (and love) her manuscript and offer her services as Brienne’s agent. Once she had an agent, Brienne figured most of her work would be done. Catelyn would be doing the selling. The thought of trying to “shop” her work to other people, to strangers, was enough to make her break out in hives. Self-promotion was not Brienne’s forte.

“I don’t need your criticism,” she told him. “I’m already self-conscious enough about it.”

Jaime leaned forward in his seat and regarded her with a raised eyebrow. “Let me offer you a bit of unsolicited advice,” he said. “If someone asks what your book is about, if someone actually cares enough to ask, they’re handing you an opportunity. _Take it_.”

“I--”

“And if you can’t handle criticism, don’t try to sell a book.”

Brienne sighed and pushed her food around on her plate. He was right, of course. But was he asking because he cared, or because he’d run out of things to mock her for and was looking for new material?

“It’s… a memoir. About my life.”

“Your life…?”

“My life as an Olympic athlete.”

She swallowed the rest of the wine in her cup, then poured herself some more. Jaime stared blankly at her. After awhile he said, “So it’s… a fictitious memoir, then?”

Brienne shook her head.

“But… you’re not--”

“I was,” she said. “I told you I’d been fencing all my life.”

“Not in the _Olympics_ ,” he said.

“Well, it’s not really that big of a deal.”

Jaime continued to stare. He looked like he was waiting for a punchline. When none was forthcoming, she saw the questions starting to form behind his eyes. _What happened to you? How did you go from the Olympics to the secretarial pool? What’s it like to reach your peak at age nineteen and know that it’s all downhill from there? Why are you such a flop at life?_

Brienne hated talking about the Olympics.

“I tore a ligament in my knee,” she told him, before he could ask. “Had to get surgery, and I just wasn’t as good afterwards.”

Jaime nodded slowly, then asked, “What made you decide to write about it?”

Brienne shrugged. “Dunno… I’ve always written. Journals and some stories. I just… thought it might be an interesting book.”

“So what’s the hook?” he asked.

“Hook?”

“There are thousands of athlete biographies and autobiographies out there. Why should people want to read yours? What makes it unique?”

Brienne shifted around in her chair. The air conditioner was still running, but she was starting to sweat. This was worse than a job interview.

“Well, I… suppose it’s, um… inspirational?”

Jaime wrinkled his nose and pursed his lips with distaste, like he’d just sucked the world’s nastiest lemon.

“Did you win any medals?” he asked.

“Well, no, but--”

“Then it’s not inspirational. You have to win to be inspirational.”

_So much for polite small talk._

Brienne chewed the inside of her mouth. She would not cry in front of him again. She refused.

She wanted to ask him why he thought anyone should read _his_ books. His grocery store trash. She knew he’d have a good answer, though. Of course he would.

“Did you get caught up in the doping underworld?” he asked.

“The _what_?”

"Does fencing even have a doping underworld?”

“I wouldn’t know!” she exclaimed. “I’ve never touched drugs in my life.”

“No, of course you haven’t… What about sex? Any illicit affairs with your fencing instructor or--”

“You’re disgusting.”

Brienne pushed her chair back and stood up to clear the table. She’d had enough of this conversation. When she reached for Jaime’s plate, he grabbed her wrist. She gasped.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean… I’m just trying to help.”

His grip was warm and tight, his fingertips lightly calloused. She looked down into his eyes and saw that he was telling the truth. Whether it was out of pity, boredom, or a genuine interest in her writing was anyone’s guess, but whatever the motivation he was offering her a fairly valuable commodity. Brutally honest advice from an experienced, prolific, best-selling author.

She knew she ought to listen to his questions, no matter how tactless and unpleasant, and really think about what he had to say. But it wasn’t just a book, it was her _life_.

“I didn’t ask for your help,” she told him, and wrenched her arm from his grasp.

She got back to clearing the table, then washed the dishes. Jaime sat silently, scratching his beard. Probably pondering her various failures. She could still feel his hand on her. His thumb brushing over the underside of her wrist. Or had she only imagined that part? She scrubbed hard at the frying pan and tried to blot it out of her mind.

Eventually he appeared beside her, dish towel in hand, and started drying the plates and utensils.

“I could read it,” he said.

“Oh, that’s… no, that’s all right.”

“I’d like to,” he said. “As long as you’re really looking for an honest opinion.”

_If you can’t handle criticism, don’t try to sell a book._

Brienne had been handling criticism all of her life. On her form, her strength, her speed. But this was her mind. Her heart. She knew he’d rip it to pieces, whether it was good, bad or something in between, with no regard whatsoever for her feelings. Was that preferable to Catelyn Stark’s silence? It would be more painful, but probably a hell of a lot more useful.

“Um, all right,” she said. “If you like.”

“Just don’t be offended if it takes me awhile to respond,” he said. “I've got dyslexia, so I'm a slow reader.”

Brienne rolled her eyes and turned to face him with a sigh.

“If you don’t want to read it, then why did you offer?” she asked.

“I do want to read it!” he insisted.

“So why are you making excuses already?”

“It’s NOT an excuse,” he said.

“You’re seriously telling me that you’re dyslexic?”

“Yes, that is what I’m telling you.”

He looked back at her with raised eyebrows, his mouth a tight, thin line. He was annoyed. He wasn’t joking.

“Oh, I- I’m sorry. It’s just, you’re…”

“Plenty of authors are dyslexic” he told her. “That’s why God invented spell check and editors.”

Brienne thought back to that first email he’d sent her, how she’d assumed he’d misspelled her name on purpose just to be irritating.

“Why don’t you have that in your author bio?” she asked.

“Why the hell would I?”

“Well, it’s inspirational,” she said.

Jaime laughed. “You need to find a new word. That one doesn’t mean what you think it means.”

Brienne felt her cheeks burning. _Again._ She turned away from him and went back to the dishes.

“I’m going to sit on the porch for a bit,” Jaime told her. “Send the manuscript to my email when you’re ready.”

Brienne wasn’t sure if she’d ever be ready. She glanced back at the beds, imagined Jaime sitting on the top bunk with his laptop reading about her life, all of her fears and thoughts and secrets, just a few feet away from her. It was a terrible idea, truly. It made her stomach churn.

But at least she’d know the truth. If she wasn’t cut out for writing, Jaime would not hesitate to tell her. If her life story was incredibly dull, he’d tell her that too. And she’d just have to accept it.

Before she could second guess the decision any further, she strode purposefully to her suitcase and took out her laptop. She poured herself another cup of wine as the machine booted up.

She started skimming through the first few chapters of the manuscript and found herself wincing over embarrassing descriptions of the abuse she suffered in primary school, painful ruminations about her mother’s death, and a lengthy passage concerning her first (extremely awkward) sexual experience. Did she really want to share these things with Jaime Lannister?

She moved her cursor to the beginning of the sex talk and hovered there for a few moments, battling her instinct to delete the entire chapter before sending.

It wasn’t very important, was it? He’d get the gist of the story without reading that part.

But no. She’d written it. Her life in a book that she meant to share with the entire _world._ If she couldn’t handle one man reading it, how was she supposed to put it out there for everyone else?

She squeezed her eyes shut and closed the document without altering a word.

 _Goodbye hopes and dreams... and personal dignity_ , she said to herself, and sent the email.

 

* * *

 

 


	7. En Garde

* * *

 

Jaime’s first manuscript happened by accident. He hadn’t set out to write the novel of the century, or even to tell his own personal story. All he’d wanted was for his psychiatrist to stop asking so many questions.

He'd been twenty-seven years old, bitter and aimless after being forced out of the only career he thought he’d ever have. The only one he’d ever wanted. Fighting. Killing. Those were his talents, as far as he’d known. If he couldn’t be a soldier, what was he supposed to do?

“Write it out,” was his shrink’s suggestion. He hadn’t asked for a shrink, but his lawyer had insisted. He hadn’t really wanted a lawyer either, but his father bought him one anyway. In the end, the shrink and the lawyer kept Jaime out of military prison by convincing everyone on his tribunal that he was suffering from acute PTSD. Jaime was never sure if the diagnosis was real, or if his father had bought that too, but it didn’t really matter. He tried not to think about it.

One of the terms of his release was that Jaime continue attending regular therapy sessions, once a week for at least sixteen months. Jaime didn’t want to talk about what had happened, didn’t want to talk about much of anything, and the shrink said that was fine, but that he had to let it out somehow. He told Jaime it would come out “in a bad way” if he didn’t tell someone, or at least write it down. Jaime didn’t ask what “a bad way” was supposed to mean. Didn’t have to ask. The shrink thought Jaime was going to kill more people.

Jaime had never enjoyed writing in school. Never kept a journal. He didn’t even like to read. “Write it out” seemed like it might’ve been good advice for somebody else, but not for him.

Then, one rainy, sleepless night, with a head-shrinking appointment looming the following afternoon, he decided he might as well try. If he wrote just a few words, perhaps the man would stop being such a bloody nag.

He sat in front of the television with a notepad he’d been using for scrap paper and started jotting things down. Just lists at first. Daily events that were annoying to him, people he disliked, terrible dreams he’d had. Eventually he began writing full sentences, complaints about his current situation mixed with vague and disjointed thoughts about the past.

He wrote till dawn, and then went out and bought more notepads. A package of twelve. After a couple of days, they were all completely full.

Soon his flat was overrun with notepads. They were stuffed into drawers, stacked on top of shelves and tables. He thought he might have to buy a new piece of furniture, just to house more notepads. He decided to buy a laptop instead, and attempted to transcribe some of what he’d written.

He could barely read his own handwriting, and what he managed to decipher was vaguely unsettling, so he began to change it into something else. Instead of writing about his life as it was, as it had been, he began to write about what he wished it could become.

Jaime Lannister, spoiled rich kid and dishonored military reject, became Jackson Mathis, super spy. Where Jaime was quick-tempered and impetuous, Jack was calm, cool and clever in a crisis. Jack made mistakes- every protagonist makes mistakes, or you haven’t got a story- but they weren’t colossal, epoch-shattering fuck-ups. When things went wrong, Jack always had a plan.

Jack only had eyes for one woman, but she loved him just a little bit more than he loved her.

Jaime didn’t expect anyone to read his story. Not even the shrink. He wrote for himself, because he had nothing better to do and because the words just kept coming. Nearly three hundred thousand words, by the time he was finished. Six hundred pages.

For reasons he could not identify, he’d printed those six hundred pages, stuffed them into a binder from Staples, and lugged the entire monstrosity over to his brother’s office at Lannis-Corp.

“Your resume?” Tyrion had asked, his eyebrow quirked in amusement. Tyrion was doing most of the high-level recruitment for their father back then.

“Just read it,” Jaime said. And Tyrion did. When he returned the binder to Jaime, two weeks later, most of the pages were filled with notes- red scribbles all along the margins. Several pages were entirely X’ed out, and a few of the chapters simply read “REMOVE” at the top.

“You hate it,” Jaime said, flipping through the shockingly extensive commentary.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Tyrion had scolded him. “Do you think I would’ve wasted so much time and so many red pens on something I hated?”

Jaime wasn’t sure why he’d offered to read Brienne’s manuscript- perhaps just a morbid curiosity- but he knew that without Tyrion and his red pens, that first book would’ve never been published. Maybe if he could do the same thing for someone else, he’d be repaying a little bit of his karmic debt.

The morning after Brienne sent her e-mail, Jaime took his laptop out to the lakeside dock behind their cabin with every intention of providing extensive and insightful commentary on her novel. Tyrion had carefully combed through each page of Jaime’s book, pausing to add his thoughts and suggestions as he read. Unfortunately, Jaime was neither as thorough, nor as meticulous, as his brother, and he didn’t own any red pens. He skimmed the first fifty pages of Brienne’s manuscript, adding only three comments- _more of this, less of this, dig deeper!_ \- and then dozed off in his deck chair.

When he woke, Brienne was hovering over him, flicking water at his face from a plastic Yogi cup.

“You’re in my sun,” he told her.

“Your nose is red,” she said. “You don’t need any more sun, and I’m about to make lunch.”

Jaime was pretty sure she wasn’t there out of concern for his skin, or to offer him food. He’d caught sight of her a few times as he’d read, peering out the window at him, then quickly pulling the curtain shut when she saw him looking. She knew what he was doing out here and she was looking for a reaction. He didn’t blame her. He’d have done the same.

“What’s for lunch, then?” he asked.

“Grilled cheese sandwiches and pork rinds,” she said. “Has anyone ever told you you’re terrible at grocery shopping?”

“Yes, well I’ve always had servants for that sort of thing. Perhaps it’s work better suited to my assistant.”

Brienne scowled down at him and shuffled awkwardly from one foot to the other.

“What have you been doing out here all morning?” she asked. “Writing?”

“Reading,” he said.

“Oh…?”

He watched her shift around some more, taking a kind of perverse pleasure in her hand-wringing. He thought he could probably drag this out for days before she’d finally crack and ask him what he thought, but he wasn’t that cruel.

“Catelyn Stark isn’t the right agent for you,” he told her. It was, perhaps, not the best place to start, but it was the first thought that occurred to him. And it explained Cat’s lack of response, which he thought might provide Brienne with some level of comfort.

“What do you mean? Why not?” she demanded, arms crossed defensively over her chest. “She’s one of the best there is!”

“She’s great, but not for you.”

“So you think I’m not good enough for her?”

Jaime sighed. “It’s just not a good fit. Cat specializes in thrillers and horror. She’s not qualified to judge--”

“She’s done memoirs before,” Brienne interjected.

“Political memoirs,” he said. “Former presidents.”

“So I’m not _important_ enough?”

“That’s not-- for God’s sake, will you sit down? I can’t concentrate with you looming over me like a human umbrella.”

Brienne huffed and flopped into the other deck chair, her scowl now a full-blown frown. She wasn’t going to like what he had to say next. Nobody wanted to hear that the book they’d written was not the book they’d intended to write, but he had promised full honesty.

“Look, this book is not an athletic memoir,” he told her. “It’s a coming of age story. It belongs in the Young Adult section.”

“Young Adult…”

“You need to find an agent who specializes in that field.”

“Do you think I write like a child?” she asked.

Jaime rolled his eyes. Of course she’d be a genre snob.

“Do you think William Golding wrote like a child?” he asked. “Or C.S. Lewis? Harper Lee?”

“I’m not any of those people...”

“It’s not a quality judgment,” Jaime said. “It’s the topic. The book is about your youth and young people like to read about other young people.”

Brienne wrinkled her nose and looked away.

“Let me tell you, successful Young Adult authors make a killing,” Jaime pointed out. “Teenaged girls buy more books than anybody.”

Jaime sometimes wished they were more interested in his work. His books were generally impulse buys, purchased in airports and Walmarts and hospital gift shops. People enjoyed his stories, but they weren’t obsessive about them. As far as he could tell, teenaged girls were obsessive about everything they liked and tended to spread their obsessions throughout their networks of other teenaged girls and random people on the internet. They were also willing to dump buckets of their parents’ money on merchandise, movie tickets, and more books.

“I didn’t write it to make money,” she said.

“No, of course not. You wanted to inspire people. Well, I’m telling you that this is the way,” he said. “You’ll inspire young women. Girls who are different. Who don’t fit in. You’ll inspire them to find their own talents and make a place for themselves in the world.”

She looked back at him with wide eyes, and an expression that was verging on fearful.

“Do you really think my book could do that?” she asked. Her voice was barely a whisper. Jaime thought she might actually cry.

He was tempted to make a joke to lighten the moment, but he bit his tongue and simply said, “Yes.”

“Goodness,” Brienne sighed. “I suppose I’ll have to cut a bit, if that’s the audience…”

“Yes,” Jaime agreed. “Less of the fencing stuff.”

“What? No! That- that’s the whole thing!”

“No, it’s not,” he said. It was clear from what he’d read that Brienne was very passionate and knowledgeable about her sport, but the descriptions were dry and technical, full of jargon and nerdy minutia. They needed to be relegated to a backdrop for the meatier stuff. The brutally honest depictions of her mother’s death, her strained but loving relationship with her father, the lack of acceptance from her peers.

“I was talking about the… you know, more explicit passages,” Brienne told him, and promptly turned the color of a beet.

“Ah, yes,” Jaime said. “The adolescent fumblings in your father’s stables.”

Brienne covered her face with her hands and groaned. Jaime smiled to himself. He had to admit, there was something alluring in her description of that particular incident. Something almost arousing in imagining her that way, all young and sweaty and keyed up with feelings she barely understood. Wrestling in the hay, long limbs tangled around the stable boy… Christ, it had been too long since he’d gotten laid.

“I don’t see why you’d want to take that out,” he said. “It’s formative.”

“It’s not suitable for children,” she said.

“The book isn’t FOR children,” he said. “It’s for young adults. There is a difference.”

“But--”

“Do you know the first sex scene I ever read?” he asked. “It was in my sister’s copy of _Forever_ by Judy Blume. That’s a young adult novel.”

Actually, Cersei had read it to him, along with some choice passages from _Flowers in the Attic_ , during the long, hot summer of their twelfth year. Jaime didn’t want to think about what had happened after she finished reading.

“Teenagers are twisted individuals,” he told her. “Don’t worry about trying to protect their young minds. They don’t need things to be sanitized.”

Brienne nodded slowly. “Judy Blume,” she said, and smiled. He thought maybe she was starting to get it now, the potential she held.

“Anyway, I’ve made a few notes for you. I’ll do some more and send it back once I’ve read the whole thing.”

“You don’t have to do that much,” she said. “You’ve already been a big help. I don’t want to distract you from your own writing.”

“No, I think it’ll help. Get me in the writer’s mindset and all that.”

He wasn’t sure if there was any truth to that, but if he was going to be distracted by something he figured it might as well be something productive for a change. Better than staring at his own navel.

“Well, I could pay you,” she offered.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he scoffed. “I’m not a real editor. Just consider it a favor, in return for putting up with me.”

“I suppose that’s a fair trade…”

She smiled at him, and they shared a brief laugh over what a miserable pain in the ass he was.

“If you really want to repay me, you could teach me some fencing moves,” Jaime said. He’d taken a few lessons when he was young, but once he started floundering in his studies, his father had instituted a one-sport-per-season rule. He’d chosen ice hockey for the winter, rugby for the spring. “Equestrianism” counted as Jaime’s summer sport, which had always struck him as terribly unfair. Horseback riding was more of an activity than a sport, after all. In any case, there had been no room for fencing, but he’d always wanted to learn more. In fact, he’d personally found Brienne’s geeky match descriptions quite interesting, but he knew they would be a bore to most teenaged girls.

“Really, you want to learn?” she asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

“I’m always interested in finding new ways to injure people.”

“It’s not about injuring people!” she practically screeched.

“Yes yes, blah blah, I realize that.” He hopped out of his chair and grabbed a stick from the grassy area next to the dock. “En garde,” he said, and pointed the stick in her direction.

“Seriously?” she asked.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s silly,” she said.

“Well, perhaps you could use some silly in your life.” He nearly called her Nanny Tarth again, but reading about the other children in primary school relentlessly referring to her as “4B” (Big Brown-Nosing Bitch Brienne) had caused him to feel a rather unwelcome pang of guilt over the moniker.

Brienne sighed and huffed and grumbled, but she dragged herself over to the grass and picked out a stick of her own.

“First of all, you’re holding that too tight,” she told him. “Second, your stance is ridiculous. You look like a squatting frog. And by the way, you’re not supposed to do this without a mask, so if I mar your pretty face with my stick--”

“You think I have a pretty face?” he asked.

“If I mar your face with my stick, that’s on you.”

“Deal,” Jaime said. “Now teach me your ways.”

Amazingly enough, she took the whole thing rather seriously and was able to teach him quite a bit. She corrected his grip and his stance, and they practiced lunges and parries until some menacing looking clouds started rolling in.

Brienne peered up at the darkening sky, and Jaime felt an overwhelming urge to try and knock the stick from her hand while she was distracted. She was holding it loosely at her side, and he smacked his own stick against it from behind, hoping to send it flying out into the lake. The stick didn’t move, and Brienne turned to him with a smirk.

“I saw you coming from a mile away,” she said, then turned on him suddenly and began whacking his stick with hers.

They circled each other, stick-dueling without any attention to form or finesse. Like children playing pretend swords. He could tell she was holding back a bit, perhaps so as not to “mar his pretty face” by accident, but he could still feel her strength with every blow. She was giggling, and so was he, and Jaime realized suddenly that he was having fun. The sensation was nearly unrecognizable to him, it had been so long since he’d felt anything like it.

Eventually she had him backed to the water’s edge, and he was about to yield when something shifted under his foot. A loose plank. His ankle turned painfully, and he tumbled backwards. He circled his arms, trying to find his balance, but it was too late. He fell over the side and back-flopped into the murky, green lake.

He heard Brienne shouting his name before he hit the water, and then everything was quiet and cold and dark. Water clogged his ears, filled his mouth and stung his eyes. He had no idea how deep the lake was, and he felt a momentary bit of panic.

A pesky voice in his head told him _just let go, let yourself sink,_ but his body was on auto-pilot and he quickly pulled himself to the surface. Brienne grabbed his arms and helped to haul him back onto the dock. He propped himself up on hands and knees, coughing violently for a bit, while Brienne looked on in alarm.

“Are you all right?” she asked, ten or twelve times. “Do you need CPR?”

For some reason this struck him as terrifically funny, and his coughs soon turned into laughter.

“What are you laughing at?” she demanded.

He shook his head and waved her off. “Nothing, I don’t know. I’m all right. I’m fine.”

“Well, let’s get you inside. You should check for leeches.”

Leeches… that wasn’t funny at all. He stood up, and his ankle twinged in pain. He winced.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing. Just my ankle’s a little sore.”

“You lost your shoes.” She pointed to one of his sandals, which was stuck in the planking. The other had fallen off in the water.

“This place is a death trap,” he said. “We should sue Yogi Bear.”

Brienne shook her head and grabbed his laptop from where he’d left it under the deck chair. They started walking back to the cabin and he found himself grunting every time his left foot touched the ground. Brienne noticed his limping, and put her arm around his waist.

“Hang onto me,” she told him. So he wrapped his soggy arm around her shoulders and hopped. They were about halfway back to the cabin when there was a loud crack of thunder. The clouds that had been gathering opened up and started spitting rain at them.

“Run!” he told her. “Save the laptop!”

She clutched it to her chest and darted towards the cabin and Jaime hobbled the rest of the way back on his own.

Once he’d reached the cabin, he stood in the doorway dripping pools of water, his bare feet covered in mud and his ankle screaming in pain. Brienne was at the dining table with a towel, drying off his laptop and checking it for signs of life. She was drenched. Her khaki shorts clung to her endless thighs, and the brief time they’d spent in the sun had brought a splattering of freckles to the surface of her arms and legs. Her t-shirt was a pale pinkish color, flimsy, and soaked all the way through. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

“I think it survived,” she said.

Jaime stared.

“What’s the matter?” Brienne asked. “Is your ankle very bad? Do you need to see a doctor?”

“Um, no. No it’s fine,” Jaime said. “I’ll be fine.” He dragged his eyes away from her breasts and wobbled over to the sofa.

“You’re soaking wet, don’t sit down on---”

Jaime sat with a groan, and Brienne huffed. He lifted his foot to rest on the coffee table.

“It should be elevated, shouldn’t it?” he asked. She shook her head and tossed him the towel.

“You’re worse than a dog,” she said.

Then she seemed to catch sight of herself, because she suddenly gasped and crossed her arms tightly over her chest. Her skin turned that delightful beety shade again and she made a dash for the bathroom with her carry-on.

“I’m going to shower,” she muttered, and quickly disappeared.

While she was in there, Jaime stripped and dumped his clothes onto the floor in a heaping puddle. He changed into his sweatpants and an undershirt, then sat on the dry side of the couch, where he remained for the rest of the afternoon. Brienne made him lunch, and eventually was persuaded to play a game of Monopoly, which turned into several games of Monopoly, a few Boggle matches, and one particularly fierce round of Hungry Hungry Hippos. The rain refused to let up, and there was nothing else to do.

Brienne asked him about his ankle every fifteen or twenty minutes, which was fairly irritating, but otherwise he had to admit he was enjoying her company. They drank a lot of wine, which probably helped.

When night rolled around and it was time for bed, Brienne insisted on letting him sleep in the lower bunk cocoon she’d created for herself. She didn’t want him climbing the rickety ladder to the top bunk on his ankle. He’d been icing it all day and taking copious amounts of Advil. Thanks to that, and the wine, he was feeling no pain, but he wasn’t about to argue with her.

He crawled into the bed, expecting to doze off relatively quickly, but once he’d lain down he was suddenly restless. Itchy. The blanket felt too heavy; the a/c sounded too loud. He kept thinking of leeches in the lake and feeling around his body, half expecting to find one latched onto his flesh. He was too hot, then too cold, then too hot again. His dick was inexplicably and insistently hard.

He thrashed around for a bit, trying to ignore his body’s needs, but it was a bit like having to take a piss when he was driving. The more he struggled to “hold it in” as it were, the stronger the urge became.

He needed to toss one off, that was all there was to it.

He listened for signs that Brienne had fallen asleep, snoring or deep breathing or the mumbling she was sometimes prone to when she dozed off in the car, but the air conditioner was too noisy for any other sounds to break through.

 _Well, if I can’t hear her, she won’t hear me_.

He ran his palm down over the front of his sweatpants, cupped himself through the cotton. Somehow it seemed less egregious to do this right under Brienne’s nose if he kept his clothes on. He tried to think of the last good bit of porn he’d watched online - he’d been using a lot of porn for the past year or so, trying to avoid unwanted thoughts - but the images kept shifting.

The naughty stewardess in the airplane lavatory became, horrifyingly, Brienne and the stable boy, writhing on a bale of hay. The cheerleader with no panties under her uniform became… Brienne, with no bra under her wet pink t-shirt.

He rolled over with a frustrated sigh, pressing his now painfully stiff cock against the mattress. He continued to flick through his mental catalogue of images, but nothing would stick. Everything turned to Brienne.

He tried to turn it off entirely, to focus on repulsive thoughts instead. The leeches. Other bugs. Broken bones. Disemboweled corpses. An old man eating a pastrami sandwich. Nothing was disgusting enough to discourage his dick, though; the thing had a mind of its own.

There was only one thing left. In desperation, he let his thoughts wander to the place they wanted to go. To _her_. That day in the pool house. The gold bikini. Her body, tanned and glistening and damp. Whispering in his ear. _There’s something I want to try._ The memory was so vivid, he could smell the chlorine, the sun tan oil...the Pantene…

But that was Brienne. Brienne’s shampoo. She was so close to him, while he was doing this, humping the bloody mattress with Brienne just a few feet above him, so close to him he could smell her shampoo, and for some reason that- _that_ was the thing that finished him off. He came in his pants with a startled grunt.

“Are you all right?” she called down.

Jaime froze.

Fucking Christ, couldn’t he have a moment’s peace?

“I’m fine,” he called back. He hoped she didn’t notice the tremble in his voice, how short of breath he was. Thank God for the ridiculous privacy curtain she’d set up. Without it, he wouldn’t have been surprised to see her face peering down at him over the side of her bunk.

“Is it your ankle?” she asked.

“It’s nothing!” he barked. “Go to sleep!”

“Fine,” Brienne huffed.

When she’d been silent for long enough that he was satisfied she’d fallen asleep, or had at least finished speaking, he kicked off his sticky, filthy sweatpants and tossed them to the floor. He was going to sleep naked, and she’d just have to deal with that in the morning.

They had one night left in this cabin, but he didn’t think it was a good idea for them to stay here any longer. These sleeping arrangements were not working for him. They were obviously making him deranged.

They’d move on tomorrow, he decided. Head for New Orleans. They’d stop at a normal hotel, where he’d have his own _private_ room, and he’d be free to peruse internet porn to his heart’s content.

 _Never again,_ was his last thought before finally drifting off to sleep. Never again would he allow this lumbering, peculiar, pest of a woman to invade his sexual fantasies. Never again.

* * *

 


	8. Urgent Care

* * *

 

Jaime was naked.

When Brienne climbed down from the loft in the morning, she found a pile of discarded blankets, pillows and clothing on the floor beside his bed. The privacy curtain she’d draped over the lower bunk was sitting in a crumpled heap beside the pile. She wasn’t sure how he’d managed to yank that down without her noticing, or why he would’ve wanted to.

He was sprawled out across his mattress, arms and legs akimbo, face up. Everything… up.

She felt herself beginning to flush as she stood over him, darting her eyes about in a frantic attempt to look anywhere but _there_. It wasn’t long before her gaze settled on something even more alarming than his nudity.

“Dear God,” she gasped. His ankle had exploded overnight. His foot was swollen now as well, and there were patches of skin surrounding the area that had mottled to deep shades of purple and green.

Her exclamation caused Jaime to wake with a start. He grunted and looked at her with bleary eyed confusion for a moment. Then, seeming to recall his nudity, he gave her a slow, curious smirk.

“Like what you see?” he asked, and stretched his arms in what she could only assume was meant to be an alluring fashion.

“No, I do not!” she told him. “Look at your foot!”

He glanced down and his eyes widened.

“Oh, that doesn’t look very good,” he said.

Brienne scooped the discarded sleeping clothes off the floor and tossed them onto Jaime’s naked body.

“Get dressed,” she said. “I’m going to find a hospital.”

“Hospital?” he sniffed. “That’s a bit of an over-reaction, don’t you think?”

“You need to have that X-Rayed,” she said.

“I wanted to leave this morning. I’m sick of this place.”

“We can leave after you see a doctor,” she told him.

Jaime grumbled and flopped around while Brienne booted up her laptop and began a search for the nearest medical facility.

This was her fault. If he’d been seriously injured, if they had to cut the trip short, if he couldn’t finish the book, it would all be because of her. She was a distraction, just as she’d suspected. He’d spent all afternoon reading her novel instead of working on his own, and then she’d thrown him in the river in a pitiful attempt to impress him with her fencing prowess.

She should’ve brought him to a doctor yesterday; she’d thought so at the time, but she knew he’d object and she hadn’t wished to deal with the argument. The truth was, she’d been enjoying herself. Enjoying his company and his relatively pleasant mood. His attention. His interest. She hadn’t wanted to ruin the day with what would’ve surely been seen as nagging.

“It’s not broken,” Jaime said. “They’re just going to tell me to put ice on it.”

She glanced over at him and was relieved to see that he’d managed to dress himself. But his sullen, pouty expression reminded her of why she was afraid to have children.

“You might have a fracture,” she told him. “Better safe than sorry.”

“Yes, Nanny Tarth,” he muttered. Brienne felt a stab of sadness, tinged with annoyance. She’d begun to think he’d let go of that idiotic nickname.

“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. “I’m not your nanny. I’m just a human, caring for another human.”

Jaime sat up and swung his legs around the side of the bed, wincing when his feet touched the floor. “Because it’s your job,” he said.

“It’s not--”

“What did Cat tell you when she gave you this assignment?” he asked, in a snarling tone. “That I needed a personal assistant, or that she wanted someone to keep an eye on me?”

Brienne averted her eyes, back to the laptop and away from his suddenly intense and accusatory gaze. She couldn’t deny it. She’d been enlisted as a babysitter, and if she let his injury go unchecked she’d be failing in her duties. But that wasn’t the only reason she wanted to help. It wasn’t why she cared.

_Why do I care?_

“I don’t blame you,” Jaime told her, more gently now. “She’s your boss.”

“She wants you to write your book.”

“Yes,” he sighed. “I understand the situation.”

“And I- I suppose she cares about you. As a person,” Brienne stammered. She had no idea if that was the case. In fact, it seemed rather unlikely. Jaime scoffed.

“She despises me. This is about money, nothing more.”

“Whatever her reasons--”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “She won’t be happy if I die of a sprained ankle before I finish the book, so let’s go.”

Brienne suddenly recalled something Catelyn had once told her. A trick she used when it came time to drag her youngest son to the doctor for his annual physical.

“We can get a treat on the way back,” she told him. “Anything you like.”

“Treat?” Jaime asked.

“Yes. Candy or… cheeseburgers? Whatever you like.”

“A treat,” Jaime repeated. “Do you have any idea how condescending that is?”

“Yes.”

He huffed out a sigh and crossed his arms over his chest.

“I want a chocolate shake,” he said. “From McDonald’s.”

Brienne smiled. “Deal.”

There was an Urgent Care Center about fifteen minutes outside of the campgrounds, and when Jaime and Brienne arrived, the waiting area was filled with noisy children (many of whom were sporting various camping-related injuries), and disgruntled looking adults. She helped Jaime limp over to a pair of seats across from a family with twin boys who’d apparently contracted poison oak on their vacation. The boys scratched furiously at their arms and legs, and bickered loudly over an iPad,while their parents looked on with grim exasperation. She expected Jaime to be annoyed with the ruckus, and with being forced to wait, but he sat calmly without a word of complaint. Even more surprisingly, he smiled at the boys with something resembling genuine fondness.

Brienne dug her notebook out of her purse and began a game of Tic-Tac-Toe on one of the pages. She passed the notebook and pen over to Jaime, and he gave her a wry smile and marked an X in the center square. They sat for nearly forty-five minutes, passing the notebook back forth and speaking very little. Tic-Tac-Toe changed to Dots and eventually to Hangman, which was rapidly aborted when Brienne realized Jaime was using the game as an excuse to make her say obscene words.

When their turn finally came, Brienne discovered she was actually rather nervous. She’d wrapped Jaime’s foot in a bath towel for protection, and she was suddenly afraid that this was the wrong thing to do, that she’d made things worse somehow. She didn’t want to recount the story of how he’d wound up in this state, and she didn’t want to have to explain her presence here and who she was to Jaime. She felt self-conscious in the examining room, sitting in the chair that was typically meant for someone’s parent or spouse, watching the nurse unravel the bright orange bundle on his foot and take his blood pressure and temperature. When the doctor came in, that feeling intensified.

The doctor was beautiful. Tall, but not _too tall_ , with thick red hair and a perfect figure. And young. Probably younger than Brienne herself, and already a doctor. She introduced herself as “Ros”, no surname and no title.

“Jaime Lannister,” she said, reading his name off her clipboard. “That sounds familiar.”

“I’m a writer,” he told her. “You may have seen my books in a hospital gift shop.”

“Yes!” she exclaimed. “Oh my goodness! I read… what was it, _Murder Street_ …?”

“ _Assasin’s Alley_ ,” Jaime corrected her.

“Yes, _Assasin’s Alley_! I read it on my last vacation. I’m a big fan!”

She turned to Brienne. “Are you the--”

“Colleague,” Brienne said. “We’re colleagues.”

She nodded, looking pleased, and began the exam. Jaime was all smiles as she poked and prodded at him. No wincing, grunting, or complaining for Doctor Ros.

She asked him a series of questions as she examined him (what was he doing in town; how did he like the mountains; was the weather “hot enough” for him; had he tried their famous “whole hog” barbeque yet) and Jaime answered them all with inane pleasantries and not a trace of sarcasm.

By the time Doctor Ros was pointing out a hairline fracture in his X-Ray, Brienne was too irritated to say “I told you so”.

“You’re going to have to wear a boot for a week or so,” Doctor Ros told him. “Just to keep the ankle stable.”

“Well, I’m not really sure if we’re going to be here for a week,” Jaime said. Brienne glanced up at that. Just a couple of hours ago he was sick of the place and ready to leave immediately. Now, suddenly, he was “not sure” if they’d be there for another _week_?

“You should be fine,” she told him. “If you’re concerned you can get it X-rayed again wherever you go next, but I think it will heal nicely.”

She wrote him prescriptions for an anti-inflammatory and a heavy-duty painkiller, and Jaime handed the papers to Brienne.

“Try to keep it elevated as much as possible,” Doctor Ros said.

“What about driving?” Jaime asked.

“That should be all right in a day or so, but I wouldn’t do any mountain climbing or bungee jumping or anything like that.”

“Well, there goes the weekend,” Jaime said. Doctor Ros smiled. Brienne rolled her eyes.

“Just try to get some rest,” Doctor Ros told him.

“All right, well, bring me your best boot I suppose,” Jaime said. Doctor Ros giggled. “Do I get to keep it?” he asked.

“Well, you’re going to be paying for it, so yes I suppose it’s all yours.”

The boot was going to irritate him, Brienne guessed. She could already imagine the thing flying out the window of the SUV within a couple of days. Hopefully the pain killers would at least render Jaime unconscious for a bit.

“It was so great to meet you, Mister Lannister,” Doctor Ros said. “I’m going to have the best story to tell, now!”

Somehow, Brienne didn’t think anyone would be particularly interested in this story. Paperback novelist sprains ankle, flirts with doctor, news at 11.

The doctor handed Jaime her business card. “My cell is on there,” she said. “Don’t hesitate to call if you need anything.” Jaime nodded, and she said it again. “ _Anything_.” As if he could’ve missed her meaning the first time.

“Thank you, Ros,” Jaime said. He shoved the card at Brienne. “Here, hang onto this,” he told her. Brienne sighed.

She should’ve seen this coming. Jaime was handsome, wealthy, single and marginally famous. Of course he was going to have women throwing themselves at him wherever he went. For some reason she hadn’t really considered the prospect of being witness to his mating rituals on this trip. She hoped he’d at least have the decency to take the doctor back to her own home, rather than their cabin. She’d spent enough of her life getting evicted from hotel rooms and apartments for the night so that more attractive people could copulate in private. “Doubling up” had been one of her least favorite aspects of traveling with the Olympic team.

True to her word, Brienne brought Jaime to McDonald’s once his exam was completed and his boot was in place. She bought his milkshake and a coffee for herself, and they sat in the parking lot drinking while they waited for his prescription to be filled at the CVS across the street.

In between slurps, Jaime picked at the straps on his boot. “This is going to be irritating,” he said.

“At least it isn’t a cast,” Brienne pointed out. “You can take it off at night.”

_While you’re fucking Doctor Ros_.

“So, I suppose we ought to stay at the cabin for another day after all,” she said. “The doctor told you to get some rest.”

“Yes, I suppose,” Jaime sighed. He sounded surprisingly morose about it.

“I thought perhaps you might want to stay even longer now.”

“Why in the world would I want to do that?” he asked.

“Well… Doctor Ros…?”

“She said I was okay to drive,” Jaime said.

Brienne pursed her lips, frustrated. He was going to make her say it.

“She wants you to call her.”

Jaime gave her a smug little smirk. “Yes, I noticed that,” he said.

“Well, aren’t you going to?” she asked.

Jaime shrugged, slurped. “Perhaps if my foot falls off.”

“She’s very pretty,” Brienne pointed out.

“Yes,” Jaime said.

“And young… probably fairly intelligent. She is a doctor.”

“Would you like to call her yourself?” he asked. “She seemed heterosexual, but I suppose you never know.”

“You’re the one that was flirting with her!” She flinched at the shrill, accusatory tone of her own voice. She’d meant the comment to be light and teasing.

“I was _not_ flirting,” Jaime insisted. “I was being polite.”

That was a laugh. Jaime Lannister, being polite.

“So you’re not interested?”

“We’re only going to be here one more night.”

“How much time do you need?” she asked.

“Time for _what_?”

Brienne sighed. Was he being deliberately obtuse just to irritate her? Was it just another juvenile ploy to get her to say s.e.x.? Why had she even started this conversation?

“All I’m saying is, I think she’d be willing to sleep with you without much effort on your part,” she told him. “And I’m sure she’s smart enough to know that’s all it would be.”

“Oh, happy days,” Jaime said. “Just what I’ve been wishing for.”

There was an edge to his voice. He sounded truly annoyed, which confused her. No-strings sex with beautiful people; that was the dream, wasn’t it? Brienne wasn’t exactly an expert on men, but she knew that was exactly what most of them wished for. Was it possible Doctor Ros wasn’t beautiful enough for him? She was just as pretty as Margaery, and Margaery was the prettiest girl Brienne had ever known.

“I thought you were here to stop me from doing stupid things,” he said.

“Having sex is stupid?” she asked.

He gave her a dark, impenetrable look. “Sometimes,” he said.

She could tell she was treading into dangerous waters, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself.

_Testing him. You’re testing him_. It was an unfortunate habit of hers, one which had ultimately led to the demise of her only serious relationship. Hyle had failed the test. Miserably.

This wasn’t a relationship, though. This wasn’t… anything.

“She’s a doctor,” Brienne said. “I’m sure she practices safe sex.”

“I’m not talking about diseases,” Jaime said with a scowl. He slammed his empty milkshake cup into the drink-holder between their seats. “It’s a waste of time and energy,” he said. “I’d rather just do it myself.”

“Do it your--”

“I find casual sex depressing, all right?”

“Oh...” Brienne said. She thought it might have cheered him up a little, perhaps even inspired him to write.

“I know that’s a bit odd,” he said.

“For a man.”

“Yes,” Jaime said. “For a man.”

Perhaps there was a tipping point, then. A level of attractiveness where a man no longer required the validation that bedding random women provided, and instead began to find the experience lacking in some way. It was a relief to know that this trip wasn’t likely to turn into an odyssey of sexual conquests for Jaime, but there was also something strangely unsettling about it.

“Anyway, I should use this time to write, don’t you think?” he asked.

“Yes!” Brienne said. “Yes, you should.”

Not only was Jaime injured, the weather was turning ugly again. While they’d been sitting in the car, the rain had returned in full force. It was the perfect sort of day for writing. No more of this distracting sex-talk. She was falling down on the job.

That’s all it was, just as he’d reminded her this morning. Her job.

Unfortunately, when they returned to the cabin, Jaime swallowed a vicodin with a glass of wine and promptly passed out on the sofa, where he remained for the entire afternoon, and then into the night. Brienne almost woke him for supper, but he appeared to need the rest.

She took the opportunity to work on her own, badly neglected writing. Jaime’s suggestions had surprised and confused her at first, but now she found his ideas invigorating. Looking at her novel with new eyes, a new audience in mind, gave her a new sense of clarity and focus. She tapped away on her laptop while Jaime snored on the couch, editing and re-working, reshaping the story. She had dozens of ideas.

She glanced over at him periodically as she worked, checking to make sure he wasn’t dead. She’d advised him against mixing the pills with alcohol. He said he’d done it before, “plenty of times,” and that he would be fine, but this wasn’t particularly reassuring.

She wondered what he would say when she sent him the revisions. Would he be pleased she was taking his advice? Would she manage to surpass his expectations? With each altered passage, she found herself imagining his response. His praise.

When she crawled up into the loft bed that night, she felt anxious, itchy under her skin. She was satisfied with what she’d accomplished, but irked that Jaime had been the inspiration. Her desire to impress him was discomforting. And the whole Doctor Ros thing was just… weird.

She found herself thinking back to that morning, to Jaime sleeping naked and the discarded privacy curtain, which was still on the floor. He was probably just a restless sleeper. He’d probably stripped because of the heat, and pulled the curtain down by accident in his sleep. Or was it possible he’d done all that on purpose? He’d given up trying to make her uncomfortable, trying to get rid of her, so why would he do such a thing? Would he do it again tonight?

She tossed and turned for a long while, playing the day over in her mind, wondering what might happen tomorrow. Her stomach was churning and her palms were sweating. It was a strange night, but it was also the first night since the trip began that she didn’t go to sleep wishing for her own bed, her own apartment, her normal job and associates and life in general. Everything in New York seemed impossibly far away, and she couldn’t bring herself to imagine a future beyond their next destination.

She wasn’t homesick anymore. In fact, she barely even felt as though she had a home. The world had shrunk to just her and Jaime, the SUV and the road ahead.

* * *

 


	9. Big Easy

Jaime looked like a refugee.

He suspected this had been the case for some time now. He hadn’t had a proper haircut in over a year, his shaving habits had been spotty at best, and his everyday wardrobe consisted of a couple pairs of jeans and a rotating schedule of increasingly deteriorating undershirts. And it was fine, really. It hadn’t seemed important back in his hermit hidey-hole, or that isolated cabin in the middle of pig-fucker North Carolina, but now he was in New Orleans. A real city. And staring at himself in a gilded, full-length mirror in his luxury suite at the Bourbon Orleans Hotel, pondering in which 5-star restaurant he’d like to dine this evening, he realized his appearance was no longer acceptable. It was, in fact, revolting. He stood out like a leprous sore against the tasteful, elegant décor surrounding him. It was time for a change.

Fortunately, he didn’t have to tackle the problem himself. There was a spa at the hotel. He called down to the lobby and threw his name and some dollar figures around, and ten minutes later there was a team of experts in his room, trimming, washing, and massaging.

The beard went first, then the hair, and then the knots in his shoulders from the ten hours he’d just spend folded into the back seat of the SUV. He found himself groaning uncontrollably while the masseuse rubbed him down, and he wondered if Brienne could hear him. He’d gotten them connecting rooms, and he imagined her harrumphing around next door, listening to his sounds of pleasure.

Would she think he was taking her (extremely bizarre) advice and fucking some random woman he’d picked up in the hotel lobby?

It would serve her right, he thought, and let out a long, loud moan.

“You’ve got a lot of tension,” the guy said, and jammed his elbow into the center of Jaime’s spine. This was better than sex. Certainly better than sex with that Doctor Ros would have been. Really, what _was_ Brienne thinking?

He took a shower when his session was over, and under the perfectly pressurized spray of hot water, he felt human again. Almost good. But then, standing naked in the mist-filled bathroom, he wiped a little hole in the fogged up mirror and took a look at himself. The sight of his face, bald and unblinking and so similar to his twin’s, caused his chest to tighten painfully.

He looked changed in some ways– gaunt and worn and _old_ – and there were the familiar dissimilarities, the scar on his cheek and his busted up nose, but still, still…

This had been a mistake. He needed a drink.

He wrapped a towel around his waist and stalked back out to the bedroom. He rapped twice on the connecting door to Brienne’s room.

“It’s open,” she called out, and he was surprised to find that yes, it actually was. She hadn’t bothered to lock it.

Brienne was already swaddled in her sad excuse for pajamas- track pants and a wife beater, topped off by a mangy looking red bathrobe- and sat hunched over her laptop, tapping away. He wondered if she was working on her book. He’d emailed her another round of suggestions last night. When it came to other people’s work, it seemed, he was positively bursting with ideas.

“Sending Cat your nightly report on my wrong-doings?” he asked.

“Mm,” she said, and tap-tap-tapped some more.

“Let’s go eat.”

She glanced up from her laptop, and when she caught sight of him she gasped aloud and clutched at the top of her bathrobe, pulling it closed to cover the view of her negligible cleavage. She narrowed her eyes at him, confused. Did he really look that different?

“It’s just me,” he said. “Relax.”

“What happened to you?” she asked. “You’re all… shorn.”

“Yes, I was attacked by a deranged barber,” he said.

Brienne rolled her eyes and huffed. “Did the barber take your clothing as well?”

“I’m about to get dressed,” he told her. “And you should too. We’re going to get dinner.”

“Isn’t it a little late for that?” she asked.

“It’s only eight o’clock!”

“And we’ve been driving all day,” she whined.

“Yes, so we could get here and do things,” he said. “Aren’t you hungry?”

“I got some almonds at the CVS,” she said.

“ _Almonds_??”

“Yes, what’s wrong with -”

“This city has some of the finest dining in the world and you’re going to sit in a hotel room eating drugstore almonds?”

“Well, I--”

“That was a hypothetical question,” he said. “We’re going to dinner. Knock when you’re ready.”

~

Cafe Amelie was a small, bistro-like restaurant tucked away on a side street off the French Quarter. They were seated outside, in a courtyard festooned with climbing vines and strings of white Christmas lights. A three-tiered fountain was planted in the middle of the dining area, completing the suffocatingly romantic atmosphere.

The place had been Tyrion’s suggestion. Jaime had only been to New Orleans once, on a book tour where he’d been too busy working to be a tourist. Tyrion had been here dozens of times. It was one of his favorite cities. He’d sent Jaime a list of recommended restaurants, bars and tourist attractions, broken into three outstandingly unhelpful categories: places to bring women you want to fuck, places to meet women to fuck, and places to drown your sorrows when you can’t find anyone to fuck. Cafe Amelie was on the first list, and now Jaime could see why.

Brienne looked even more uncomfortable and awkward than usual in her black pants and stiff, white, button down blouse. Jaime had been curious to see if she might wear a dress, if she even owned one. But no. She was all business, except for her hair which was styled in a slightly softer fashion than usual. Pieces of it kept falling over her eyes, and she’d periodically swipe at them with a scowl.

Jaime was wearing a suit- the only one he’d brought on the trip. It was a wrinkled mess from being shoved at the bottom of his suitcase, he couldn’t manage to locate his tie, and he was still forced to wear the wretched boot on his ankle, but all things considered he thought he’d made a pretty impressive effort.

He ordered a bottle of Pinot Grigio and swallowed half of his first glass in one undignified gulp. He wondered if he could manage to get Brienne a little bit drunk, and what that might be like. Would she be a weepy drunk? An overly friendly one? Would she get violent, angry?

He’d probably never find out. She wasn’t touching her wine, and was clutching her menu with white-knuckled intensity and a pinched expression.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Doesn’t anything look good to you?”

“It’s a bit… pricey,” she said. “If I expense this--”

“Don’t be stupid,” he told her. “It’s my treat.”

“But--”

“No buts,” he cut her off with a wave of his hand. “I’m disgustingly wealthy. It’s the least I can do.”

In truth, he’d been paying in full for everything so far. She kept giving him checks, tracking amounts for hotels and diners and rest stops in a little marble notebook, but he fully intended to shred all of her checks when the trip was over. He hadn’t decided yet if he was going to tell her that, or let her collect the reimbursement money from Catelyn Stark first.

She sighed and scowled, but seemed to relax a little. She took a sip of wine, then another, and her shoulders dropped a bit.

“If I get an escargot appetizer, will you share it with me?” she asked.

“I will not,” he said. “But please, get whatever you like.”

“You don’t like them?”

“I’ve never tried them.”

“What? How is that possible?” She looked genuinely offended. “You live such a privileged life and you never--”

“They’re _snails_ ,” he said.

“They’re a delicacy!” she insisted.

“So are cockroaches in some countries.”

“That’s not even true! And it’s hardly the same thing.”

They went back and forth for some time over the validity of eating big blobs of slime, and somehow, by the time they arrived at the table, she’d convinced him to try one.

“You have to take it out of the shell and feed it to me,” he said. “I don’t want to look at it.”

“My god, what a princess,” she grumbled. Her cheeks turned a violent shade of red and she averted her eyes, but then she actually did it. She shoved her fork at him, and he closed his eyes and took the revolting globule into his mouth. And it was good. Really, quite amazingly good.

“See?” she said.

“It’s all right,” he said, and grabbed another one off her plate. “Hurray for new experiences.”

“That’s the point of this trip, isn’t it?” she asked. “New experiences, to inspire your writing…?”

“Yes. Perhaps I’ll write about somebody eating snails. You never know.”

“Are you… writing at all?” The question was tentative, non-accusatory, and it hit him like a brick to the gut. He looked up at her, then back down at the table. Took a gulp of wine. They’d been travelling for nearly two weeks now. Two weeks, and nothing. And nearly a year before that.

“Are you going to tell Cat whatever I say?” he asked.

“I did promise...she entrusted me to…”

“Tattle?”

She sighed and put her fork down. “Do you understand the seriousness of your situation?”

“I know they’re going to cut me off,” he said. “I’m not an idiot.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Try to write a book, I suppose. What else?”

“Can you?” she asked. And that was the question, wasn’t it. They’d all find out the answer soon enough.

“So far, no,” he said.

“Why do you think that is?” she asked.

Jaime shrugged. He’d heard a lot of theories, mostly from his brother. Tyrion was constantly talking about Jaime’s “damaged psyche” and how his grief and his guilt and his writer’s block were all connected in some kind of toxic stew of dysfunction. It sounded like a lot of psychobabble to Jaime.

“Perhaps I’ve just run out of things to say.” He popped another snail out of its shell and shoved it into his mouth. These things were addictive.

“I find that hard to believe,” Brienne told him. “You haven’t given up, have you?”

“No, not yet,” he said. But if this trip didn’t jump-start something…

“What if you did?” she asked. “I mean, what if you just… broke the contract? Or asked to be released? Maybe it would take some of the pressure off.”

“The pressure isn’t the problem.” He’d written under pressure before. He’d done far more difficult things, under far more pressure than this. He thrived under pressure. Ultimately, the contract wasn’t that important. He could afford to lose a contract. The problem was more existential than that. Could he really call himself a writer anymore? How long were you allowed to go without putting words to the page and still keep calling yourself a writer? And if he wasn’t a writer, then what the hell was he supposed to be?

“Anyway,” he said. “Aren’t you here to make sure I fulfill that contract?”

Brienne chewed the inside of her mouth and gave him a squirrely expression. “Of course,” she said. “I wasn’t really suggesting…”

But she had suggested it. She was trying to help him, to her own possible detriment. And he’d caught her at it.

Over their entrees, and a second bottle of wine, he noticed her staring at him.

“What?” he asked.

“You have a little scar,” she said. “On your cheek there.” She pointed at it and his hand went up reflexively to cover the mark. It had faded substantially over the years, but he still felt a little self-conscious over it. He still remembered Cersei’s reaction to the initial gash, to the ugly black stitches. Her anger.

_“You’ve ruined your face for nothing!”_

“How did you get it?” Brienne asked.

“I jumped into a frozen lake,” he said. “Cut myself on some branches.”

“Why in the world did you do that?”

“My brother…” he sighed, took another big swallow from his wine glass. He hadn’t thought about this in a long time. Never talked about it. “We were at boarding school together. Some boys threw him into the lake.”

“Oh my,” Brienne gasped. “That’s terrible. Why did they—“

“Why do bullies do anything?”

They had been bullies, it was true. _Lord of the Flies_ cast-offs who tormented the slowest, the fattest, the weakest boys in their class. But Tyrion… he was so much younger, and those bullies usually didn’t bother with anyone in the underclasses. They’d never bothered Tyrion before that day. And sometimes Jaime wondered. Why.

The biggest and meanest of the bunch- Osmund, that had been his name- he’d been sniffing around Cersei that whole winter term, trying to get a date. Trying to get fucked. Sometimes Jaime wondered.

“It was very brave of you to jump in after him,” Brienne said. She was glassy-eyed now, on her fourth or fifth glass of wine, and she was looking at him like he was some kind of hero or something.

“I didn’t really think about it,” he said. “He’s my brother. It’s just… what you do.”

If he thought about it now, if he had to really pinpoint a moment when his life started to go to shit, it was probably that day in the lake. Seventeen years old, and that was it. Just a few weeks later, Cersei was in his room crying, and then they were at the clinic and she was saying _never never never again_ , and _there’s probably a mutant inside of me_ , and it had been the first time they’d ever really talked about it- this _thing_ between them. First time they’d ever had to talk about it. And that was all she could say. Never again.

Never again had, eventually, turned into _maybe, sometimes, if I need you_ , but it wasn’t ever the same.

Brienne was still looking at him, _admiring_ him, and he was starting to sweat.

“Let’s go see a band,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

~

He took her to a place called Vaughan’s Lounge, another recommendation of Tyrion’s, from the “places to meet women to fuck” list this time. It was a dive bar, packed and noisy and “off the beaten path”. They had to take a taxi instead of walking, and the neighborhood was obviously not the greatest, which was fine with Jaime. Most of the frat boys and fly-over state tourists would probably be afraid to venture in this direction.

There was a small brass ensemble on the stage, playing some upbeat, Dixieland-style jazz, and a crowd was packed onto the tiny dance floor. The house specialty was something called a Moscow Mule, and Jaime ordered one for himself and one for Brienne. The glasses were huge, and the taste was a confusing mixture of ginger, lime, and vodka.

They stood near the bar, sipping their drinks out of straws. It was too loud to have a conversation, and he was glad for it. He was tired of talking.

The bar was perfect- the kind of place he would have savored describing in loving detail, back when he was a writer who wrote things. He tried to just absorb the atmosphere. Maybe something would worm its way into his mind and he’d be able to spit it back onto the page later on.

By the time he finished his Mule, Jaime was officially wasted. He didn’t get drunk very often, he left that to his siblings, but now that he was loaded he couldn’t really remember why he didn’t do it every single day.

“Let’s dance!” he shouted into Brienne’s ear. For the look she gave him, he might as well have suggested they strip naked and run down the street singing Norwegian folk songs.

“I don’t dance!” she shouted back. “I can’t dance!”

He shook his head, grabbed her hands. None of these idiots could dance, Jaime couldn’t dance- certainly not with this idiotic boot on his ankle- everyone was drunk, nobody cared. It was New Orleans for God’s sake.

“You worry too much!” he yelled, and started yanking her towards the throng of gyrating, sweaty bodies.

There was barely room to move, really, let alone dance, so they mostly just stood and swayed and bounced a little. He took off his jacket and tossed it towards a table. He’d probably never see it again. Brienne rolled up her sleeves, unbuttoned a few buttons on her blouse. When she moved a certain way, he could see a hint of white lace covering the curve of her left breast.

Eventually he wound up standing behind her, and because they were packed so tightly, because he was so drunk, because it was New Orleans, he put his hands on her hips. Her ass was pressed against his dick and he could smell her sweat and her Irish Spring soap and Pantene hair conditioner. He wanted to kiss her neck, to bite it. He wanted to rub himself against her like a dog until he came, right here on the sticky dance floor of this seedy little bar.

_This is why I don’t get drunk._

Brienne sagged backwards, leaning her head on his shoulder. He thought for a moment that she wanted something from him, that she maybe wanted a kiss, but then she tilted her face towards his ear and shouted, “I FEEL LIKE I’M GOING TO BE SICK!”

“Do you want to go?” he asked, and she nodded vigorously.

He helped her off the dance floor, and towards the exit. She was wobbly and groaning. He found an empty bit of wall to lean her against.

“I have to take a piss before we go,” he told her. “Are you all right here?”

She nodded, so he darted to the men’s room, pushed and shoved through the crowd as quickly as he could manage with the fucking boot, and then he went to the bar and bought her a bottle of water. Hopefully she’d make it back to the hotel without puking all over the place.

By the time he’d made it halfway back to her, she had company. Some ginger-bearded piece of trash in a “Kiss Me I’m Irish” t-shirt. He had his hand on the wall behind her, and was leaning in close. Brienne was frowning, looking away from him, making the universal woman-signals for “leave me the fuck alone”, but the signals were being ignored. The guy touched her face, her sweaty neck, and she squirmed. He was tall, taller Jaime and taller than Brienne, but he was probably more inebriated than the both of them put together. Jaime dropped the water bottle, clenched his fists.

He closed the distance between them, just as Brienne was extricating herself from ginger-beard’s grasp. Jaime grabbed the guy’s shoulder, spun him around, and punched him hard in the face. Harder than he meant to. Blood sprayed out from his nose, splattered onto Brienne’s white blouse.

Brienne stepped between them grabbed Jaime’s shoulders, pushed him backwards.

“Jaime, NO,” she shouted at him. “What are you DOING?”

The guy was still standing, slumped against the wall, hand over his face. He looked dazed. Then he looked angry. Jaime wanted to hit him again. He wanted to keep hitting him until he was on the ground.

Gingerbeard started lunging in their direction and Jaime was ready, his blood was singing for this, but then some steroid explosion of a security guard appeared out of nowhere and just like that he was being “escorted” out of the bar and tossed onto the sidewalk.

The fresh air made him dizzy, and he stumbled a bit. His ankle felt weird, like he’d fucked it up again, made it worse somehow in all the ruckus.

After a minute or so, Brienne stomped out of the bar, then walked right past him without stopping. He thought she was heading back in the direction they’d come from, towards the French Quarter and their hotel, but he wasn’t entirely sure. He trailed behind her, limping, nauseous. So goddamn drunk. How did that happen?

He expected her to turn on him and start griping at any moment, nagging about his drinking, his violence, his recklessness. He could’ve gotten arrested. He could’ve gotten hurt. He was a fucking fiasco of a human being. She was quiet, though, and that was worse.

At some point, she dug out her phone and called them a cab. In the backseat, he risked a glance in her direction and was astonished to find that she looked to be on the verge of tears.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She sniffed and nodded. “Just tired,” she said.

“Are you angry?”

“I just want to get back to the hotel.”

She was angry. Why wouldn’t she tell him? Why wouldn’t she fight with him?

“I was defending your honor,” he said.

“Don’t do that,” she said. Calm, she was too calm. “I’m not your excuse.”

At the hotel, in the elevator, he tried again.

“It was just a stupid bar fight,” he said. “I think you’re over-reacting…”

She just sighed, then the bell dinged and the doors opened, and she said “Goodnight, Jaime,” and walked away from him.

When he got back to his room, he collapsed onto the bed, fully dressed, and shut his eyes. He stayed that way for quite a long time, but he didn’t sleep. The events of the night kept replaying in his mind, like a skipping record. He wished he’d could’ve gotten even more inebriated. It would have been nice to just pass out, black out, forget.

Brienne was angry with him, really and truly angry. Not the fun kind of angry. And as he began to sober up, his righteous indignation gave way to something truly alarming- shame.

Eventually, he started to drift in and out of sleep. In his dreams, he was back at Eton. The school grounds were deserted, but he didn’t feel like he was alone. As he wandered through the empty, hollow dorms and knelt in the chapel and swam in the frozen lake, he felt like he was being watched. Followed.

He woke up in a cold sweat, just as the sun was rising. He got out of bed, made some coffee, and then he started to write.

He wrote about his dreams, and then he wrote about all the “haunted Eton” stories his classmates used to tell. Stories about dead children and sadistic headmasters and Bloody Mary in the bathroom mirrors. By nine am, he had nearly five thousand words, and the beginnings of an outline. A story was taking shape, finally. _Finally_. 

He wanted to give Brienne enough time to sleep off her drunkenness and, hopefully her anger, so he waited until 10:30 to knock on her door. He expected her to still be in her pajamas, maybe even still asleep, but when she yanked open the door she was fully dressed. Her hair was dry and she was wearing makeup. She looked like she’d been up for hours.

There was an open suitcase sitting on the bed behind her, half packed. Jaime’s stomach lurched.

“Ready for breakfast?” he asked.

Brienne made a weird shrugging-nodding motion and darted her eyes around nervously.

“I thought afterwards we could go on that boring Garden District walking tour you were talking about yesterday,” he said.

“Actually,” she sighed, “I thought I would head to the airport.”

“What’s at the airport?”

“A plane to New York,” she said. “Jaime, I think it’s time for me to go home.”


	10. This Is Not a Romance with the Road

* * *

 

“I knew it,” Jaime said. “I knew you were angry!”

Uninvited, he shoved his way into Brienne’s room. He was wearing a sweat-stained undershirt and last night’s dress slacks. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair askew. He didn’t smell very good.

“I’m not angry,” she said, and it was the truth. Try as she might, she couldn’t seem to muster even the slightest bit of irritation over what had happened last night. She wasn’t entirely sure if she ought to be angry. What _was_ the correct response? Nothing like this had ever happened to her before.

Brienne wasn’t the type of woman who inspired bar fights. She wasn’t the type of woman who men sought to protect. On the rare occasions when she’d attracted unwanted sexual attention from some truly desperate letch, no one had come to her rescue. People just assumed she could take care of the situation herself. She looked strong, brutish even. Surely she could fend off a sloppy drunk in a bar.

Often, Brienne was the one doing the rescuing, providing protection to her more attractive, less intimidating friends. She was a cock-block, a convincing fake lesbian, a six foot three barrier to advancing creeps. She wasn’t a damsel in distress. Not to anyone, but especially not to a man like Jaime Lannister.

She could only assume he’d used the situation as an excuse to let off some steam, and her creep-of-the-night had provided a convenient punching bag. It wasn’t about her. It couldn’t be about her. And no, it didn’t make her angry. She liked it, and that was a problem.

Worse, though partially buried under the ruckus that followed, was the memory of what it had been like to dance with Jaime; his hands on her hips, hot, drunken breath on her neck, and… something pressing into her backside. It was all completely inappropriate.

“I just think... maybe you were right in the first place,” she said. “I don’t think this was a good idea.”

“What wasn’t?”

“Taking this assignment. Going on this trip with you.”

“This is crazy,” Jaime said. “Look, I’m sorry all right? I had too much to drink. It won’t happen again.”

“It’s really not about that,” she said.

“Then what?”

“I’m just... I’m not helping you,” she said. “I’m making things worse. This trip has been one calamity after another, and--”

“What? No it hasn’t.”

“We were mugged. You broke your ankle. Then we--”

“It’s _not_ broken,” he said. “That’s an exaggeration.”

“The point is, I’m not good for you.”

He tilted his head to the side and crossed his arms over his chest. “ _You’re_ not good for _me_?”

“You wouldn’t have hurt your foot if it wasn’t for me. You wouldn’t have been in that situation last night either. And I’ve obligated you into looking at my work, which is taking up too much of YOUR time. I’m distracting you.”

“Distracting me from what?” he demanded. “All the brilliant work I was doing before you came along?”

She took a deep breath, straightened her back. Why was he making this difficult? Earlier, laying in bed, she’d rehearsed this conversation in her head. She’d expected it to be relatively simple and straight-forward. Far easier than what she’d be facing later, when she’d have to call Catelyn Stark to confess her abysmal failure.

Why was he arguing? This is what he’d wanted from day one.

“I’m wasting your time,” she said. “Your energy. Ms. Stark’s money...”

“Is that what this is about?” he asked. “Money?”

“No, it’s--”

“I’ll pay you,” he said. “Whatever she’s paying, I’ll double it.”

She stared at him. None of this made any sense.

”I‘m her assistant,” she said. ”Not yours. I can‘t... I won‘t take your money.”

“Then what?” he asked. “What do you want?”

“I want to get back to my life!” she said. It was a lie, and she waited for him to call her on it. To remind her of the fact that she had no life to speak of. She almost hoped that he would. This would all be so much easier if he would say something awful.

Instead, he sighed and told her, “I wrote last night.”

“You did?”

She wasn’t sure how that was possible. They’d both had so much to drink, and they’d gotten back to the hotel after two am. If he had been up all night writing, there was no way it was any good.

“I wrote a _lot_ ,” he said. “I’ll send it to you if you don’t believe me.”

“Well, I suppose that’s good,” she said. “Maybe now you can--”

“Please don’t leave,” he said.

One corner of his mouth slanted downwards. His expression was pleading. He looked so _sad_.

_He’s lonely._

She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t realized that simple fact a long time ago. It was blindingly obvious.

For as close as he held that iPhone, the damned thing never seemed to ring. She never noticed him texting or calling anyone. She knew he’d spoken to his brother once, back in North Carolina, but that was it. No friends or family appeared to be checking in with him, concerned about his whereabouts.

Brienne’s chest tightened, her stomach flip-flopped, and she realized it was over. She would do whatever he asked. Now, and probably for the rest of her stupid life.

“Yes, fine,” she said. “All right.”

She turned away and stared into the depths of her suitcase. She couldn’t bear to look at him any longer.

“Breakfast then!” he said, and clapped his hands. “Give me twenty minutes. I’ll shower and send you what I wrote.”

She listened to him leave, closing the connecting door gently behind him, and she realized there were so many questions she should have asked. So many conditions she should have placed upon staying. How long did he expect this trip to continue? Where was it going to end? Did he have a time limit, a final destination in mind? Was she supposed to just keep ignoring the fact that he wasn’t cashing her checks and continue letting him pay for everything? Was he going to keep listening to easy listening music from the 1970’s in the car?

She sighed. At least he was writing. That was something. And, true to his word, he sent her an email almost immediately. She took a tentative look while she waited for him to shower. There was a three page outline, along with several pages of prose. She skimmed the outline, tried to get a gist of the idea.

It was about a teacher, returning to the private boarding school where he’d spent much of his youth. Where his younger brother had died in a tragic accident, falling through the ice on a frozen river. He was haunted by the memories of his childhood, trying to overcome his personal demons. And his literal ones.

It was a ghost story. A ghost story from the man who didn’t believe in ghosts. Who’d become almost violently angry when she’d mentioned the topic.

He’d been thinking about it, though. It was evident from the outline that he’d been thinking about a lot of the things they’d discussed.

Maybe she was helping him more than she realized.

~

“So, where to now?” she asked him over a breakfast of beignets and Chicory coffee at an outdoor cafe in the French Market. Brienne thought she wouldn’t mind terribly if they stayed in New Orleans for a few more days. In spite of the emotional upheaval of the past 24 hours, she felt fairly relaxed sitting in this outdoor cafe, drinking coffee and watching the people go by. It really was a lovely city- more European than any place she’d been in America. Perhaps she was homesick after all. Not for New York, but for her real home.

“Texas,” Jaime said. “Big Bend National Park, eventually. But here first.”

He pushed his phone across the table. The browser was open to a listing on Trip Advisor for a place called Tee Pee Motel & RV Park. It was a row of tee-pee shaped buildings, which Brienne assumed were hotel rooms of some sort, standing forlornly in the middle of an empty field. There was a tacky neon sign with a cartoon Native American man in a headdress, beckoning visitors to “sleep in wigwam”.

“Well,” Brienne said. “This is offensive.”

“It’s kitschy,” Jaime said.

“Those are not mutually exclusive,” she pointed out.

“Well, where would you like to go?” he asked.

“Nowhere,” she said. “I mean, it doesn’t matter. It’s your trip.”

Jaime sighed. “It’s not my trip,” he insisted. “It’s _our_ trip. You’re my road buddy.”

Road buddy. Brienne shook her head. Maybe he was trying to make her feel more welcome and included, but she couldn’t allow herself to start thinking of this as a personal vacation. Trampling over the few personal boundaries she’d managed to erect between them would only make this situation more untenable.

Besides, he’d ridiculed her endlessly over Philadelphia, and she’d chosen that by accident. God forbid if she picked a place on purpose, and he wound up hating it. Once this strange desperation for her company had passed, he’d never let her hear the end of it.

“The teepee place is fine,” she said. “If you think you’ll be able to write there, that’s where we should go.”

“I dunno, I’ve never tried to write in a teepee before,” he said.

“I took a look at your outline,” she told him. “It sounds like a very interesting story.”

“You think?”

“Yes, it’s quite good.”

It was great, honestly. The outline was complex, bouncing back and forth in time and tying many plot threads together into a seamless, coherent whole. The structure was sound. Many of the ideas were unique, poignant and, perhaps most importantly for a ghost story, creepy as hell. Assuming the prose was readable, it was an incredibly impressive output for a single drunken night’s work. Brienne knew it would have taken her weeks of careful thought and consideration to come up with an outline like that, and she felt a bit envious of his seemingly effortless talent. A bit frustrated as well, when she considered the kind of genius he could be producing if he possessed just an iota of self-discipline.

“Rather different from your usual fare, isn’t it?”

“What do you know of my usual fare?” he asked. “Have you actually read any of my books?

“I’m reading one right now,” she told him, and immediately regretted it. Reading his books voluntarily, for _fun_ , revealed a level of interest in him that she knew she’d be better off keeping to herself.

“Which one?” he asked.

“The one with the girl…”

“They’ve all got a girl,” he said.

“The one from the woman’s point of view,” she said.

Jaime grimaced and rolled his eyes. “Why that one?” he asked. “Nobody reads that one.”

He was right, in a way. Of all his books, _Double Blonde_ was the only one that had never appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List. He’d written it nearly ten years ago, long before Brienne started working for Catelyn Stark, so she wasn’t sure exactly how much money he’d earned from the publication, but it had to be considerably less than his usual profit. There were only a hundred or so reviews on Amazon, in contrast to his usual one thousand plus. But of those hundred or so reviews, the majority of them were five stars. The people who did read it, generally seemed to love it.

“I was curious if you could do it,” she told him. “Lots of male authors struggle with female protagonists.”

“Ah. So what’s the verdict?”

“So far so good,” she said. The narrator wasn’t exactly someone Brienne could relate to, but she seemed authentic. She felt like a real person. Brienne thought the book might have been written before its time. Before psychotic anti-heroines became so en vogue. If it were published today, it would have “the next _Gone Girl_ ” slapped all over the promotional materials, and Brienne would be annoyed to see it. Everything was the next _Gone Girl_ these days. But Jaime had written it before _Gone Girl_ existed.

“Really?” he asked. “You like it?”

He sounded surprised and, strangely, a little annoyed.

“I’ve only read about fifty pages so far,” she said. “But yes, I’m enjoying it. It’s compelling.”

“Cat thought it was too dark,” Jaime said. “She was afraid it wouldn’t sell to my usual audience, and she was right.”

“The reviews were positive,” Brienne pointed out. “Lots of people liked it.”

“The woman it was based on didn’t like it,” Jaime said with a scowl. “She didn’t even finish it. She said it was ridiculous.”

So that was the problem, then. Judging by his sour expression, Brienne guessed the woman in question was an ex-girlfriend or something. If she really was anything like the character in _Double Blonde_ , the relationship must have been challenging, to say the least.

“Maybe she just didn’t like seeing herself,” Brienne suggested.

Brienne wasn’t sure how she would react to something like that. Would she even be able to recognize herself in the pages, if someone cared enough to write a book about her?

“Anyway, you’ve never done a ghost story before, have you?” she asked.

“No,” Jaime said. “It’s a risk. It’s not what Baratheon’s expecting.”

“Don’t think about that,” she said. “Just keep writing.”

Brienne’s phone started vibrating on the table, and she looked down to find a text notification from Margaery. Early this morning, after Brienne decided to leave, she’d sent Marg a message letting her know she’d be coming home early. At the time, it felt like a kind of armor against changing her mind. If Ms. Stark tried to talk her into staying, Brienne thought having that message out there in the world would steel her resolve. It would have just been too embarrassing to have to tell Marg that she’d backed down. Maybe the plan would have worked, if she’d made it that far. But she hadn’t made it past Jaime’s pleading eyes, and Margaery had been completely forgotten.

She picked up the phone and took a quick glance at the text. _When will u be home? Was your boss pissed??_

“Anything important?” Jaime asked. Brienne shook her head, turned off the phone.

“Ready for that walking tour?” she asked.

He said that he was, but after just one block it became apparent that a walking tour was the last thing Jaime needed. He’d cleaned up a bit, and was wearing sunglasses that covered the mottled purple blotches under his eyes, but he was still visibly exhausted. He was limping worse than ever, and he broke out in a heavy sweat after just a couple of minutes of sidewalk strolling.

It was obvious he didn’t want to be walking around in the heat like this. He was hungover, and hadn’t slept at all. He was doing it for her, because they were, apparently, “road buddies” now. And he didn’t want her to leave.

“I think maybe you should just go get some rest,” she told him. “You don’t look well.”

He didn’t argue at all, which proved he was feeling even worse than she suspected. In fact, he looked grateful.

She told him to get some sleep, and watched him hobble his way back towards the hotel. Halfway down the street, he turned back towards her. He looked startled to see her still standing there, watching him, and he froze for a moment. He slowly lifted his hand and waved at her. She waved back, then fled in the opposite direction.

She made her way to the Garden District, but decided to skip the walking tour. She didn’t really feel like being in a group of strangers. Not without Jaime. There was nothing worse than being in a group alone.

Instead, she wandered aimlessly for a bit, snapping photos of houses she found particularly interesting, and trying to ignore the insufferable heat. Eventually she sent a text back to Marg- _Changed my mind. Talk later_. She felt foolish, but Marg was only her neighbor after all. She didn’t owe the woman an explanation of her life choices, did she?

After about an hour, she had to confess that she wasn’t enjoying herself at all. The humidity seemed almost malevolent in its intensity, and made her feel wrung out and exhausted. She found it difficult to focus on the houses and cemeteries and gardens she’d come here to see. Her thoughts kept circling back to Jaime. To the fact that he’d offered to _pay_ her to stay with him.

She gave up, took a taxi back to the hotel and ordered some ice cream from room service. Then she took a nap.

Jaime knocked on her door late in the afternoon and told her it was time to leave. He was suddenly sick of New Orleans.

They drove out of town on an endless monstrosity called the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. It was apparently the longest over-water highway bridge in the world, crossing 24 miles of lake and connecting New Orleans to the suburb of Metairie. It was out of their way a bit- the interstate would’ve been a more direct route to Texas- but Jaime wanted to see the big bridge, so that’s what they did.

According to Jaime’s internet research, police who patrolled the bridge were frequently called upon to rescue panic stricken motorists who froze up somewhere around the midway point, after losing all sight of land, and simply refused to drive any further. Brienne had never been afraid of bridges before, and this sounded to her like a bit of hyperbole designed to draw more curiosity seekers to the bridge. It sounded ridiculous, until she found herself clutching the wheel with white knuckles, sweating and gasping for air.

There was just so much water. In every direction. The bridge was so low, and the water was so high. It seemed like the waves might come up and wash over the roadway at any moment. She felt like she was floating, like she was nowhere. One wrong move, one jerk of the wheel, and they’d go plunging into the lake. She’d never experienced vertigo before, but she suspected it was something like this. She was certain she was going to drive the car into the water- she almost felt as though she wanted to.

“Are you all right?” Jaime asked.

“Yes, good, fine,” she snapped.

_Just a couple more miles._

She’d be able to see land again in a couple of miles. She’d be able to see the end.

Jaime turned in his seat, tilting his body towards her. He put his hand on the console between them, closer to her side. Next to her leg, but not touching it.

“Listen,” he said. “Just… thank you. For doing this. I know it’s difficult.”

Brienne wasn’t sure if he was talking about the bridge, the entire trip, or both. She took it to mean both, and for some reason it helped. She felt the tension in her muscles ease a bit. She stopped looking at the water and focused on the road.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “It’s not so bad.”

She gave him a quick glance, a small smile. He grinned back at her.

“Land ho,” he said, and pointed forward.

It was just a tiny speck in the distance. She had to squint to see it, but it was there.


End file.
